Page 105 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Unit 6: Thomas Hobbes

an action was performed, or by standards or expectations to which it must conform, rather than by Notes
any agreement concerning the right to do it or responsibility for it”. The authorized sovereign had
his limits, bound by the laws of nature to ensure peace and safety. The sovereign had duties
towards the subject.
The sovereign would protect his subject from rebellion, and for this Hobbes laid down seven
injunctions. The first was patriotic commitment to the status quo. The second, to resist demagogues;
the third was to respect the established government. Fourth, there was a specific need for civic
education. Fifth was the importance of discipline that was inculcated in the home. Sixth, there was
a need for people to be taught about law and order, to abstain from violence, private revenge,
dishonour to person and violation of property. Seventh, that right attitudes would bring about the
right behaviour. Hobbes had faith in the universities to train and educate the citizen-elite with the
help of his Leviathan.
Individualism and Liberalism
Individualism and absolutism of the state were two sides of the same coin in Hobbes’ theory.
Absolute sovereignty was the logical comple ment to riotous anarchy. His premises were
individualistic and liberal, but his conclusions absolutist and illiberal, which was why his philosophy
contained both liberal and illiberal features. It was liberal because the state and society were
constituted by free and equal individuals who were egoistic, self-interested and selfish. It was
liberal because it emphasized the element of consent as the basis of legitimate regulation of human
affairs, as a yardstick for independence and choice in society. The illiberal aspect of Hobbes’
theory was that an all-powerful absolute sovereign was a self-perpetuating one. There was no
procedure to periodically renew the individual’s consent to the sovereign power. The subject did
not actively participate in the political process, nor was there a mechanism to secure his active
support. Society itself was a loose composition of discrete individuals lacking cohesiveness.
The sovereign was the artificial person and continued as long as he did not offer grounds for
resistance. Nor was there a check against arbitrary or tyrannical exercise of power in the form of
a strong civil society. But it was to Hobbes’ credit that he identified the source of absolute sovereign
power and clearly defined its powers. The powers of the sovereign were neither intangible nor
supernatural. The basis of political authority is consent which Locke refined subsequently through
his formulation of two staged contract.
Hobbes accepted the discrete, egoistic, self-interested, atomistic individual as the building block of
his all-powerful state edifice. The individual had the right to his private space, namely thoughts
and economic activities. The individual did not get subsumed or merged in the all-powerful state.
If the individual was threatened, then the Leviathan lost its rationale to exercise. Society was a
cooperative enterprise as long as the individuals saw it as necessary for their well-being and
benefit. Undoubtedly, Hobbes was the greatest and the most consistent individualist. He portrayed
rugged individualism in politics, economics and religion:
It is one of the oddities of Western political thought that the critics’ image of the
Hobbesian theory of sovereignty should have been anticipated in the famous
frontispiece adorning the 1651 edition of the Leviathan ... the picture seems a perfect
summary of Hobbes’ thought: the blessings of peace are assured only when society is
in total subjection to an absolute authority.
The Leviathan towered over the surroundings with a sword of war in one hand and the scales of
justice in the other, overlooking an orderly and prosperous city, thriving under the peace he made
possible. Hobbes reinforced this description by characterizing the Leviathan as the “mortal god”,
the “greatest of human powers” and “the greatest dominion that can be granted ... limited only by
the strength and forces of the city itself, and by nothing else in the world”. But as one looked more
closely at the frontispiece, one saw that the sovereign’s body was composed of a multitude of tiny

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