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Hobbes’s moral philosophy therefore provides justification for, and informs, the theories of sovereignty and the state of nature that underpin his political philosophy. [ 2 ] In utilising methods of deductive reasoning and motion science, Hobbes examines human emotion, reason and knowledge to construct his ideas of human nature (moral ...
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.
In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson uses the phrase bellum omnium in omnia ("war of all things against all things", assuming omnium is intended to be neuter like omnia) as he laments that the constitution of that state was twice at risk of being sacrificed to the nomination of a dictator after the manner of the Roman Republic.
Hobbes reasoned that this world of chaos created by unlimited rights was highly undesirable, since it would cause human life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". As such, if humans wish to live peacefully they must give up most of their natural rights and create moral obligations to establish political and civil society .
Sovereignty lies with the people, and the people should elect, correct, and, if necessary, depose its political leaders. [2] Popular sovereignty in its modern sense is an idea that dates to the social contract school represented by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).
From here, Hobbes developed the way out of the state of nature into political society and government by mutual contracts. According to Hobbes, the state of nature exists at all times among independent countries, over whom there is no law except for those same precepts or laws of nature (Leviathan, Chapters XIII, XXX end).
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 ...
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 (Old Style), in Westport, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England.Having been born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes later reported that "my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear."