Thomas Hobbes And Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had very clear opinions on the production, the purpose, and the purview of a sovereign. Hobbes’ sovereign was singular, like a monarch, Rousseau’s was collective, like a direct democracy. Both considered significant the concepts of human nature and natural rights as applied to a sovereign. I will first explore how these thinkers’ sovereigns emerged from their States of Nature, following a procedural argument as to why there was a need for a sovereign, and what that sovereign was therefore meant to do. It is critical to comprehend from where these sovereigns came in order to fully understand the implications of their creation. Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s conclusions on the sovereign may at first seem grossly

divergent, and were not without differences that we shall properly investigate, but in fact prove to be quite alike upon deeper inquiry. I will then present my argument, combining both to form what I think is a more realistic and appropriate theory for modern political societies.
Hobbes began the Leviathan by depicting a State of Nature in which all people were essentially and naturally equal.

Each individual had both the freedom to do what was needed in order to survive, and affliction of the ever-present “fear and danger of violent death.” His theory of human nature, stemming from theories born of the Scientific Revolution, was that humans react, in accordance with the universal laws of human nature, to their surroundings and to the stimulants that they encounter. “Good” and “bad” were meaningless except in the effort to relate “appetites” and “aversions.” Hobbes said humans had no sense of morality, only individual inclinations. He extrapolated that human nature inclined them to be slaves to their passions, solely self-interested, and concerned primarily with self-preservation. His universal claim was that humans naturally pulled towards pleasure and fled from fear. That being said, however, Hobbes also argued that humans were able to be reasonable and rational, utilized as a tool when it suited them. This led to why he claimed there was a need for a sovereign, because humans, logical yet self-serving, wanted to live in a civil society as it was instrumental to satisfy their need to not live in perpetual peril. Due to this desire they yielded their autonomy to a sovereign

authority.
Hobbes’ argument emerges from the hypothetical State of Nature where humans were equal, as even the strong can be taken over by the many, resources were scarce, and there was no cohesive polity or overarching power. Such a place would undoubtably be uninhabitable, which led to the conclusion that there was a definitive need for a sovereign to reign in the bedlam. The people had to recognize the laws of nature, foremost among them that each individual must be willing and wanting to pursue peace should others also be willing and wanting, but yet be able to pursue violence should others not cooperate. In order to escape constant conflict and create satisfying safety and security in the long run there had to be a sovereign ruler who would enforce laws, punish lawbreakers, and ensure peace. Hobbes presents a social contract in which two conditions must be met by the people. First, the people had to forfeit their rights of freedom in nature, the rights they had against each other. Second, the people had to submit to and invest power in a higher ruler, a supreme leader who established and maintained peace. The agreement to live under one sovereign, and to grant that rule the power to enforce a social contract and its inherent laws, was the one way a people may hope to be rid of the State of Nature.
Once a sovereign had been inaugurated, Hobbes applied very precise rules about who this may be, how they may rule, and what they may do. While he argued that the sovereign must be an absolute power, such as a monarch, he firmly rejected the claim to the divine right to rule. There must be no higher power than the sovereign, not even God. Hobbes argued that political obligation should not fall under religious obligation. Neither should the sovereign share power with or be influenced by others, therefore he also rejected the democratic appeal to a parliament. By so rejecting these two views Hobbes, both radically and conservatively respectively, said that the subjects were equal in rank to each other with no claim to power over another and that the sovereign had to hold ultimate authority for the society to exist. Hobbes, a true man of the state, said the sovereign may wield power however it deemed fit, notwithstanding certain critical and binding elements. The sovereign made laws, enforced contracts, and meted out justice against injustice. The sovereign exercised power against those who wronged others, those who sought to break the rules of the polity, and those who attempted to take away any of the sovereign’s power. The sovereign needed to be effective, in control, and able to manage the complex framework of laws and institutions that upheld the society to direct the peoples’ actions to the common good. Hobbes argued that these were the essential requirements of a viable political and social order.
In understanding Hobbes let us consider his opinion on politics in and of itself. To Hobbes, politics should not actually exist. Political power should be centralized in the sovereign, and society should be decentralized and depoliticized. The strongest and most unified sovereign was strictly separate from the people and, ideally, all power was contained in one single individual. The sovereign was not subject to the social contract, it was above the law entirely, with its own near-unlimited freedoms. The sovereign’s public power should rule, both over and for, the private, passive people without question, and without much communication, intermingling, or integration. The final measure of the sovereign’s immeasurable power was that there may be no objection to the way in which a sovereign regulated the society’s affairs, for it was only the existence of the sovereign that stood between the subjects and the State of Nature. Hobbes concluded that the objective of political rule lay in the subjects’ safety, which was thus why he determined that the sovereign must be fully empowered to make effective the natural moral law.