The Political Philosophy Of Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) was a British thinker, well known for his political philosophy. Working in the heart of the political power, he has been the witness of the deteriorating relations between the King and the Parliament of Great Britain in the seventeenth century, which has influenced his work. While the conflict degenerated into a civil war, Hobbes went into exile in Paris. There, he wrote de Cive, and Leviathan, considered as his major works . In both book, Hobbes deals with the establishment of a State to end the state of nature, a state of war of all against all. In Hobbes’s thinking, the State is an artificial body. It can only act through its representative, which can be either an individual human man or a group of men. Hobbes

Divided powers need a constitution in order to set the division and empower rulers in the different fields . Hobbes thinks that people won’t be able to agree on the establishment of the constitution. In the same way, he asserts that: “Where men reign that be subject to diversity of opinions, it cannot be so” . Therefore, to be efficient, the representative of the State must have a full unified power. As men are unable to cooperate, the different branches of government would be unable to establish any substantial cooperation among themselves, and unable to agree on any

Self-interested people would necessarily try to take control over anyone else’s power in order to enlarge their power or at least to prevent others from robbing them the power they already have . Divided powers necessarily end in clashes between the different branches of government and can even turn into a civil war . Because of the nature of man, the disagreements among those who hold power cannot be resolved peacefully. According to Hobbes, it fosters conflict between elites, who mobilizes the people to fight behalf, and it may turn into civil war. In Behemot, Hobbes shows that war issued from the constitutional struggle between Parliament and the King . In Leviathan, he argues that the experience of the civil war has shown the mischief of dividing the rights of the sovereign . Hobbes based his arguments on his own experience of the English civil war. His vision may be blurred by his times. Contemporary of the first British revolution that led to the fall of Charles I, Hobbes strongly believes that the civil war was due to the division of power between the King and the Parliament. Thus, his vision of power and sovereignty is not objective, but influenced by his own experience. To him, only a single authority which can control the governmental powers would be able to achieve