THOMAS HOBBES

- born April 5, 1588, Westport, Wiltshire, England—died December 4, 1679, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire.

- English philosopher, scientist, and historian, best known for his political philosophy, especially as articulated in his
masterpiece Leviathan (1651)

- Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, theology, and ethics,
as well as philosophy in general.

- Hobbes viewed government primarily as a device for ensuring collective security. Political authority is justified by a
hypothetical social contract among the many that vests in a sovereign person or entity the responsibility for the safety and
well-being of all.

- His enduring contribution is as a political philosopher who justified wide-ranging government powers on the basis of the
self-interested consent of citizens.

- according to him humans are equal by nature that both have physical and mental power. This equality of power enables
them to desire the same things which causes war among them.

- according to him everyone is at war with everyone when its in the state of nature.

- according to him the state of absolute power is necessary in order to maintain peace and order within the society. And
keep the people in fear of their own protection.

- he claims that the existence of the political society is a human creation, a product of convention(agreement) among the
people.

STATE OF NATURE
- Hobbes terms this situation “the condition of mere nature”, a state of perfectly private judgment, in which there
is no agency with recognized authority to arbitrate disputes and effective power to enforce its decisions.

- the state of nature is characterized by the “war of every man against every man,” a constant and violent
condition of competition in which each individual has a natural right to everything, regardless of the interests of
others.

- the state of nature is, as Hobbes famously states, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The only laws that
exist in the state of nature (the laws of nature) are not covenants forged between people but principles based on
self-preservation.

- In the absence of a higher authority to adjudicate disputes, everyone fears and mistrusts everyone else, and
there can be no justice, commerce, or culture. That unsustainable condition comes to an end when individuals
agree in a social contract to relinquish their natural rights to everything and to transfer their self-sovereignty to
a higher civil authority, or Leviathan.

- Nothing can be said to be just and unjust , good or evil for if there is no common power , there is no law , and if
there is no standard of what is just and unjust , of what is right and wrong.

- The condition where there is no government.

- A state of constant war among the people.

- The condition of human in the state of nature is no education, no culture, no civilization, no progress, and life
was miserable.
STATE OF ABSOLUTE POWER (POLITICAL SOCIETY)
- Is necessary in order to secure peace and order in the society.

- Absolutism is the principle of complete and unrestricted government power, usually in the hands of one person,
a dictator or despot.

- in the sense that no authority is above the sovereign and that its will is law.

- According to Hobbes, the only way to escape civil war and to maintain a state of peace in a commonwealth is to
institute an impartial and absolute sovereign power that is the final authority on all political issues.

- Hobbes believed that the only true and correct form of government was the absolute monarchy. Hobbes believed
firmly in a monarch's absolutism, or the belief in the king's right to wield supreme and unchecked power over
his subjects.

- Hobbes believed that kings were justified in assuming absolute power because only they could maintain order in
a society.

- absolute power of the sovereign was ultimately justified by the consent of the governed, who agreed, in a
hypothetical social contract, to obey the sovereign in all matters in exchange for a guarantee of peace and
security.

- There is a need for the people to come together and enter into a social contract to establish a political society.
- According to Hobbes, in order to establish peace and order in a society inhabited by individuals with wolfish
tendencies. The political society cannot afford to have a weak sovereign given to human condition in the state of
nature.
- The stability of the political society can no longer afford to give humans their liberty.

LIBERTY IN HOBBES’S SOCIETY

- A luxury in the condition of war and the main cause of the human conditionin the the state of nature ,
acondition that humans try to escape by establishing a political society.

- the mere "absence of external impediments." People are free when no external obstacle hinders them from
doing what they desire to do. Laws are artificial chains reducing an individual's liberty.

- a state of freedom, especially as opposed to political subjection, imprisonment, or slavery. Its two most generally
recognized divisions are political and civil liberty.

- is the absence of arbitrary restraint and the assurance of a body of rights, such as those found in bills of rights,
in statutes, and in judicial decisions. Such liberty, however, is not inconsistent with regulations and restrictions
imposed by law for the common good.

- freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing,
thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.

- May lead to the destruction of the society.

- Liberty has no place in Hobbes society except if the sovereign allowed it.
 TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY BY HOBBES
- Refers to the movement that in one way or another manifest extreme dictatorial and fanatical methods.

- is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and
group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of
control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of
authoritarianism.

- form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all
aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.

- totalitarianism is characterized by strong central rule that attempts to control and direct all aspects of
individual life through coercion and repression.

- often distinguished from dictatorship, despotism, or tyranny by its supplanting of all political institutions
with new ones and its sweeping away of all legal, social, and political traditions.

- Hobbes's Leviathan established the architecture of the totalitarian state and initiated the cultivation of
people so incapable of exercising moral judgment that they stood idly by and let such a state commit
horrors in their name.

- One in which the ways of life of the people-what they think, read and watch, what they do , what course or
career they pursue- are controlled by the government .

- Encompassing power to direct the economic , cultural, social, political, and religious lives of the people.

- In this society people are called subjects and not citizen.

AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT
- One in which all the powers of the government-legislative , executive, judicial,- are in the hands of only one
person or group of person.

- is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to
preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.

- the authoritarian state still maintains a certain distinction between state and society. It is only concerned with
political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty.

- Totalitarian is ruled by an authoritarian government.

- is typically understood as a form of government or politics that concentrates power, minimises political
pluralism and represses civil society, often in the name of confronting a supposed ‘enemy’ within or without.

- authoritarian government lacks free and competitive direct elections to legislatures, free and competitive direct
or indirect elections for executives, or both. Broadly defined, authoritarian states include countries that lack
civil liberties such as freedom of religion, or countries in which the government and the opposition do not
alternate in power at least once following free elections.

- tends to embrace the informal and unregulated exercise of political power, a leadership that is "self-appointed
and even if elected cannot be displaced by citizens' free choice among competitors", the arbitrary deprivation of
civil liberties and little tolerance for meaningful opposition.
 CONCLUSION
- Hobbes thinks the state of nature is something we ought to avoid, at any cost except our own self-preservation.
- This is Hobbes’s picture of human nature. We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our
attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies
upon language and is prone to error and undue influence. When we act, we may do so selfishly or impulsively or
in ignorance, on the basis of faulty reasoning or bad theology or others’ emotive speech.

- Hobbes’s argument is that the alternative to government is a situation no one could reasonably wish for, and
that any attempt to make government accountable to the people must undermine it, so threatening the situation
of non-government that we must all wish to avoid. Our only reasonable option, therefore, is a “sovereign”
authority that is totally unaccountable to its subjects.

- Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no
one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment.