Shaharior Rahman Razu
Hobbes born in April 5, 1588, Westport and died in 1679 December 4. He was an English philosopher and political theorist, best known for his publications on individual security and the social contract, which are important statements of both the nascent ideas of liberalism and the long-standing assumptions of political absolutism characteristic of the times.
Major Works
Human Nature; or, The Fundamental Elements of Policie (1650); De Corpore Politico; or, The Elements of Law, Moral and Politick (1650); Leviathan; or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651).
Leviathan
Hobbes’s masterpiece, however, was the Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil 1651). In the first two parts, "Of Man" and "Of Commonwealth,"
General Social Contract Theory
In political philosophy, an actual or hypothetical agreement between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each. In primeval times, according to the theory, individuals were born into an anarchic state of nature, which was happy or unhappy according to the particular version. They then, by exercising natural reason, formed a society (and a government) by means of a contract among themselves.
Although similar ideas can be traced back to the Greek Sophists, social-contract theories had their greatest currency in the 17th and 18th centuries and are associated with such names as the Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What distinguished these theories of political obligation from other doctrines of the period was their attempt to justify political authority on grounds of individual, self-interest and rational consent.
They attempted to demonstrate the value and purposes of organized government by comparing the advantages of civil society with the disadvantages of the state of nature, a hypothetical condition characterrzed by a complete absence of governmental authority. The purpose of this comparison was to show why and under what conditions government is useful and ought therefore to be accepted by all reasonable people as a voluntary obligation. These conclusions were then reduced to the form of a social contract, from which it was supposed that all the essential rights and duties of citizens could be logically deduced. Theories of the social contract differed according to their purpose: some were designed to justify the power of the sovereign; on the other hand, some were intended to safeguard the individual from oppression by an all-too -powerful sovereign.
According to Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), the state of nature was one in which there were no enforceable criteria of right and wrong. Each person took for himself all that he could, human life was '(solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The state of nature was therefore a state of war, which could be ended only if individuals agreed (in a social contract) to give their liberty into the hands of a sovereign, who was thence forward absolute, on the sole condition that their lives were safeguarded by sovereign power.
Locke (in the second of Two Treatises of Government, l690) differed from Hobbes insofar as he described the state of nature as one in which the rights of life and property were generally recognized under natural law, the inconveniences of the situation arising from insecurity in the enforcement of those rights. He therefore argued that the obligation to obey civil government under the social contract was conditional upon the protection not only of the person but also of private property. If a sovereign violated these terms, he could be thrown.
Rousseau (in Du contrat social, 1762) held that in the state of nature man was unwarlike and somewhat undeveloped in his reasoning powers and sense of morality and responsibility. When, however, people agreed for mutual protection to surrender individual freedom of action and establish laws and government, they then acquired a sense of moral and civic obligation.
The more perceptive social-contract theorists, including Hobbes, invariably recognized that their concepts of the social contract and the state of nature were unhistorical and that they could be justified only as hypotheses useful for the clarification of timeless political problems.
Natural law and social-contract theory
In Political Thought, the supremacy of the human lawgiver, as posited by Machiavelli and in their diverse ways also by the French and English political theorist Thomas Hobbes and others, interwove in the following centuries with continued insistence by Grotius and others on the dominance of the divine reason and man's participation in it, by which he has access to the natural law.
The Dutch political and legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, amid the political expediencies and anarchy of the Thirty Years' War,(1618-48), sought to introduce a degree of normative restraint among the monarchical rulers of the newly emerged sovereign states of Europe and to establish a basis in natural 1aw for a rejection of raison d'etat as a just cause for war, as well as for 1egal limits on the means and modes of violence in war. Even if the wi1ls of sovereign states form the basis of the international order, Grotius argued, "the totality of the relations between States" is sti1l "governed by law." That law he found in an updated version of the Stoic natural law, as naturalized into Roman 1aw and Christian theology.
With Grotius, as with the Stoics, the normative or moral power of the natural law derives from the fact that man's innate nature (itself part of the nature of the cosmos) and his propensities are viewed as ideal or inherently good. In Grotius' own time, however, there arose a skepticism toward such unfounded optimism, a skepticism that underlies the thought of Hobbes.
Hobbes (1588-1679), as with the Greek Sophists, the nature of man is not the ideal nature of Grotius and the Stoics. It is rather man's supposed actual nature, before sociality and authority have tempered it. Man, in a state of nature, is motivated try desires and aversions and most of ail by the desire to preserve his biological existence. This need for security is best met by all men vesting their rights of self-help in a sovereign, whether that sovereign be a single man or an assembly of men, and subjecting themselves to the laws of that sovereign, or "great Leviathan."
The reason why men must obey the law of the sovereign state, which is the only institution capable of protecting men against each other, is thus based firmly in Hobbes's conception of man's nature, albeit a very different conception from the idealist premises of earlier theories of natural law. Natural-law theorizing after Hobbes is thus divided into these two major streams.
In his political theory Hobbes first analyzed the conditions necessary for peace and security and then, in his version of the social contract, provided a recipe for constructing an ideal state in which these conditions could be satisfied. His fundamental concept was natural right rather than natural law. It is essentially a right to self-preservation. No man is obliged to act in accordance with the law of nature if he thinks such conduct inimical to his own security. Yet peace cannot be achieved unless the law of nature is generally observed. In the absence of peace, man would live in a state of war, which would be a time of "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes's solution was to give everyone a guarantee of the good behavior of his fellows by creating a power sufficient to keep them in awe. This power will be created if each individual promises every other individual that he will carry out whatever commands some selected person (or an assembly) shall consider necessary for the peace and defense of all. A sovereign so established may survive even if all the subjects desire to depose it. The sovereign’s right will be as absolute as its power; it is responsible only to God. It cannot be unjust to its subjects, since these have authorized its actions. Nor is it bound by any covenant with the people.
The Core of social-contract
In England, Hobbes, who was to become tutor to the future king Charles II (1630-1685), developed the fiction that the "state of nature" that preceded civilization, “every man's hand [was] raised against every other" and human life was accordingly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." A social contract was thus agreed upon to convey all private rights to a single sovereign in return for general protection and the institution of a reign of law. Because law is simply "the command of the sovereign," Hobbes at once turned justice into a by-product of power and denied any right of rebellion except when the sovereign becomes too weak to protect the commonwealth or to hold it together
Basic Outlooks
1. Individual Security
As Hobbes political and social philosophy that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Although the concept of an individual may seem straightforward, there are many ways of understanding it, both in theory and in practice. The term individualism itself and its equivalents in other languages, dates-like socialism and other isms-from the 19th century.
2. Socialism
It is a system of social organization in which property and the distribution of income are subject to social control rather than individual determination or market forces.
3. Common wealth
A body politic founded on law for the common “weal,” or good. The term was often used, by l7th-century writers, for example, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, to signify the concept of the organized Political community. For them it meant much the same as either civitas or res Publica did for the Romans, or as "the state" means in the 20th century. Cicero defined the res Publica as an association held together by law.
4. The materialism of Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes was acquainted with both Bacon and Galileo. With the first he shared a strong concern for philosophical method, with the second an overwhelming interest in matter in motion. He was a comprehensive thinker within the almost completely consistent description of humankind, civil society, and nature according to the tenets of mechanistic materialism.
5. Psychological Hedonism
Hobbes started with a severe view of human nature: all of man's voluntary acts are aimed at pleasure or self-preservation. This position is known as psychological hedonism, because it asserts that the fundamental motivation of all human action is the desire for pleasure. Like later psychological hedonists, Hobbes was confronted with the objection that people often seem to act altruistically.
6. Absolutism
The political doctrine and practice of unlimited, centralized authority and absolute sovereignty, as vested especially in a monarch or dictator. The essence of an absolutist system is that the ruling power is not subject to regularized challenge or checks by any other agency, be it judicial, legislative, religious, economic, or electoral.
7. Nominalism
To Hobbes, position taken in the dispute over universals-words that can be applied to individual things having something in common--- that flourished especially in late medieval times. Nominalism denied the real being of universals on the ground that the use of a general word (e.g., "humanity") does not imply the existence.
8. Social Observation
As the types of observation are different Hobbes identifies, different types to be taken in social context.
9. Rule of Sovereign
In order for the contract to work, there must be some means of enforcing it. To do this, everyone must hand over his powers to some other person or group of persons who will punish anyone who breaches the contract. This person or group of persons Hobbes calls the "sovereign." The sovereign may be a monarch, an elected legislature, or almost any other form of political authority;
10. Skepticism
Skepticism, the philosophical attitude of doubting knowledge claims set forth in various areas. Skeptics have challenged the adequacy or reliability of these claims by asking what they are based upon or what they actually establish.
However, there are also several issues concerning Hobbes i.e. Protypism, Monarchism etc. which may be included.