Civil Law And John Hobbes: The Nature Of Law

THE NATURE OF LAW

THE COMMAND THEORY OF LAW

Hobbes had an interest in law and he variously wrote of law natural, divine, or eternal, civil, common and customary taking an interest in lawyers and their strong sense of autonomy and standing. There are even occasions which he seems superficially, to mean by law the whole range of the humanly conventional and the socially contingent of which formal laws are a subset. Predominantly, however, Hobbes is regarded as a legal positivist and as a command theorist that is, one who thought that law is a matter of command and enforcement. Yet he did not hold that any enforceable command such as ‘your money or your life’ was a law. Enforcement had to come from an authoritative command. Law then requires

In this definition, Hobbes asserts that law is command, not counsel and that law are the rules of just and unjust. Hobbes insists that any law must be promulgated. In order for one to know how to obey it, a law must be "signified by sufficient signs". Laws must be made known for them to actually be law.

Thomas Hobbes is legal positivists. In an attempt to solve the problem of interpretation, legal positivists conclude that there is only one way to interpret a law. According to Hobbes ' theory of legislation, it is the people who enforce the law that decide what it means. Hobbes viewed law somewhat negatively, arguing that the nature of the law is a restraint on

Hobbes describes human psychology without any reference to the summum bonum, or greatest good, as previous thought had done. Not only is the concept of a summum bonum superfluous, but given the variability of human desires, there could be no such thing. Consequently, any political community that sought to provide the greatest good to its members would find itself driven by competing conceptions of that good with no way to decide among them. The result would be civil war.There is, however, Hobbes states, a summum malum, or greatest evil. This is the fear of violent death. A political community can be oriented around this fear.Since there is no summum bonum, the natural state of man is not to be found in a political community that pursues the greatest good. But to be outside of a political community is to be in an anarchic condition. Given human nature, the variability of human desires, and need for scarce resources to fulfill those desires, the state of nature, as Hobbes calls this anarchic condition, must be a war of all against all. Even when two men are not fighting, there is no guarantee that the other will not try to kill him for his property or just out of an aggrieved sense of honor, and so they must constantly be on guard against one another. It is even reasonable to preemptively attack one 's