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Hobbes believed that society needed authority in order to thrive. More specifically, he saw it as a fight among humans to wield power. Hobbes accepted the idea of political obligation, stating that government and laws were needed to thrive as a society. Hobbes and Locke agreed on the idea of individual freedom.
Hobbes believes that the morals derived from natural law, however, do not permit individuals to challenge the laws of the sovereign; law of the commonwealth supersedes natural law, and obeying the laws of nature does not make you exempt from disobeying those of the government. [1] Hobbes’s concept of moral obligation thus intertwines with the ...
Thomas Hobbes (/ h ɒ b z / HOBZ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. [4]
Hobbes presents his own religious theory but states that he would defer to the will of the sovereign (when that was re-established: again, Leviathan was written during the Civil War) as to whether his theory was acceptable. Hobbes' materialistic presuppositions also led him to hold a view which was considered highly controversial at the time.
This is one of the earliest formulations of the theory of government known as the social contract. Hobbes objected to the attempt to derive rights from " natural law ", arguing that law ("lex") and right ("jus") though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the absence of obligations.
De Cive is the first of a trilogy of works written by Hobbes dealing with human knowledge, the other two works in the trilogy being De Corpore ("On the body"), published in 1655 and De Homine ("On man"), published in 1658.
The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic ...
In some places, Berkeley's argument for blind obedience to a de facto authority resembles Thomas Hobbes's argument in Leviathan, on the grounds that rebellion can lead to anarchic violence and chaos which is worse than the worst tyranny (§§16, 47, 51), although Berkeley disagrees with Hobbes's idea that moral and political obligation ...