Ethics and the Law

Abstract

In one of the most central moments of his Leviathan, in chapter 13 of part 1, Thomas Hobbes says, “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice” (1994: 78 ). This statement contains the entire logic of political modernity, at least, of the dominant and institutional type of politics grounded in the theory of sovereignty formulated by Hobbes and reaching to our days. For our purposes, what is most important in this statement is the obvious exclusion of ethics from justice and the law and thus from politics. Perhaps the first thing to be noted is that in Hobbes’s statement, the final word is not “justice,” but “injustice.” Although this may at first appear too simplistic, it might be important to also note that had Hobbes said, “Where there is no law, there is no justice,” his statement would have been more immediately comprehensible and certainly unproblematic. It would have almost been a tautology, accustomed as we are to thinking of the law in terms of justice, and of justice in terms of the law. By using the word injustice, rather than justice, Hobbes is simply summing up the theory he has been formulating so far and will continue to formulate in the following chapters of Leviathan.