Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Hobbes, The Right of Nature, and Renunciation

When Hobbes states that the right of nature is "the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature" he means to say that it is the "right to use one's judgment about preservation which is in fact the right of nature, not the bare right of self-preservation. The right of nature rests on the recognition of the salience for everybody of their own survival, but like any right it is renounceable, and its renunciation is at the heart of Hobbes' theory."

"The way in which we renounce individual judgment, according to Hobbes, is that we enter into a contractual relationship with our fellow man and erect a sovereign whose judgments we will henceforward count as our own."

Richard Tuck, "Introduction" Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. xxxii-xxxiii.

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