The Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes: The Sovereign and the State

[Music] Europeans once organised themselves into empires cities and churches but these forms of political organization disappeared and now we all live in states in consequence the quality of our lives is largely determined by how well or poorly our state functions but what is the state the first account of the state came from Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century Hobbes had witnessed the English Civil War in which Parliament had taken up arms against the king to dispute who held ultimate authority in the nation Hubbs viewed the war as ruinous and had a clear

diagnosis of its causes in short the war had been caused by false notions regarding the nature of the state the essential error was the idea that sovereignty or ultimate political authority could be divided in the case of England it was the notion that sovereignty could be shared by King and Parliament as the war had demonstrated sharing power only worked as long as everyone was willing to share Hobbes solution was to reconstruct the stage in full acceptance of the impossibility of dividing sovereignty there could be only one sovereign what was the sovereign the people as individuals

possessed many wills because each individual had the capacity for reason of course and was subject to passion but if the people agreed to form a unity in the state then multiple wills could be reduced to one will Hobbes called this unity the Leviathan a huge artificial being made by humans but as an artificial creation that Leviathan did not have a will of its own for this reason that people would need to appoint a sovereign to give a will to the state to the Leviathan the sovereign could be one person as in a monarchy or it

could be a democracy where everyone deliberated in an assembly and the assembly as a whole acted as the sovereign or it could be an aristocracy were a few subjects deliberated and together acted as the sovereign to what tasks was the sovereign to direct the Leviathan the state's primary purpose was to protect the people from outsiders usually other states it was also necessary to keep the people in good order at home good order was intended to strengthen the Leviathan to make it capable of performing its protection duties once this task was achieved that people could be

left to their own devices although we still live in states today that have this essential nature we have departed radically from Hobbes's prescriptions regarding sovereignty in fact liberal democracies are defined by the fact that they are organized in exactly the manner that Hobbes claimed was the source of disaster we have divided sovereignty between several institutions of the state the essential idea is that a state must conduct itself according to a Constitution as judged by an independent judiciary and that the laws are made by a legislature elected by the people but who is sovereign the people

the government that holds power in the legislature or the judges who administer the law of the land liberal democracies thus represent a continuous gamble we are always betting that none of these parties will try to seize the powers of any other the gamble has been lost more than once but what is perhaps most remarkable is that it has not been lost more often [Music]