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Western Political Thought

Notes disaffection with the established government. He also cautioned against democracy and the
illusionary benefits of a republic. He deplored the fact that the English political system was not
functioning smoothly, and was worried about the consequences of disorder and civil war.
The troubles that Hobbes perceived finally arrived in 1640, lasting for the next 20-odd years.
During this period, England experienced a tussle between royal and parliamentary forces, the
execution of Charles I in 1649, and a stringent Puritan rule under Cromwell. The era came to an
end with the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. Basically, three different overlapping
struggles were involved.
1. Parliament against the king.
2. The Puritans against the established church.
3. The expanding economic forces of the towns, ports and countryside against the ossified, old,
royal monopolists and landowners.
This was the period of contending political, religious and economic principles, a time of diverse
production and diffusion of social ideas. The seventeenth century witnessed ferment in political
and religious thought, bringing in a fundamental ideological shift. Increasingly, the community
was seen as an artifact created voluntarily through a contract based on mutual agreement for the
fulfilment of individual aims and aspirations. This meant that political authority could be judged,
evaluated and changed, for it was bound by a constitution and laws, and no longer absolutist in
nature. The constitutional state was emerging as the new political formation and subject of political
theorizing. Hobbes was the first to grapple with this new entity.
Hobbes equated intellectual ferment with the disorder and violence unleashed by the civil wars,
attributing it to the mischievous doctrines spread by individuals collectively referred to as “the
seducers”. These corrupting notions were: (a) that private citizens could judge the right and the
wrong, good and evil; (b) it was a sin to act against one’s conscience; (c) one’s conscience might be
supernaturally inspired; and (d) that the sovereign power must be limited and divided. Hobbes
suspected the Puritans and the universities as being the root cause of seditious activity.
The Puritans’ offence consisted in letting their consciences be their guide. In Hobbes’ day, conscience
was termed “inner light”, and Hobbes’ irritation lay in the fact that “all England seemed to be
ablaze with inner lights”. He argued that the Protestant stress on the importance of inner conviction
made all “outward things” a matter of indifference, for if true belief, as taught by the Protestants,
was private, an inward thing, a matter of the quality of one’s faith, then it did not matter what the
outward forms used for its expression were. However, this sort of individualism would lead to
confusion and anarchy. In the Leviathan, he made every effort to prove that it was not permissible
to follow one’s own conscience other than the sovereign commands:
... one of the most important factors establishing and maintaining the identity of a
political society was a common political language... . the language of politics differed
in the crucial respect that the commonness of meanings depended on a ruling power
capable of enforcing them; that is, of declaring, for example the precise meaning of a
right and punishing those who refused to accept the assertion.
Similarly, Hobbes condemned the universities as centres of sedition and the essential cause of the civil
war. He hoped that the Leviathan would persuade his readers to act sensibly and prize public order.
Order was the overriding concern, just as civil war was the greatest evil. He believed that by bringing
order into political thinking, he would have taken a long step towards bringing order into society.
Hobbes conceived of the sources of social dissension in two different ways. In the Behemoth (which
was sociological in nature), he specified groups which had seduced citizens from their obligation
to the sovereign—groups such as Presbyterian ministers, Roman Catholics, and the merchants of
the trading cities. But in Elements of Law, De Cive (The Citizen: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning
Government and Society) (1642) and the Leviathan, which were analytical and philosophical in nature,
he presented individuals, not groups, as the root of social problems.

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