Discuss the views of Hobbes on societal submission to a higher authority
What will be an ideal response?
Thomas Hobbes was an eighteenth-century intellectual who inherited the rationalism of the Scientific Revolution. Along with others, he sought to establish general laws of human behavior in terms of natural law, the unwritten and divinely sanctioned law of nature, which held that there are certain principles of right and wrong that all human beings, by way of reason, can discover and apply in the course of creating a just society.
Hobbes (along with his contemporary John Locke) advanced the idea that government must be based in a social contract. For him, the social contract was a covenant among individuals who willingly surrendered a portion of their freedom to a governing authority or ruler, in whose hands should rest ultimate authority. Hobbes viewed human beings as selfish, greedy, and warlike and so believed that state rule was ultimately necessary. Bound by an irrevocable and irreversible social contract, government under one individual or a ruling assembly was, according to Hobbes, society's only hope for peace and security. The collective safety of society lay in its willingness to submit to a higher authority, which Hobbes called the "Leviathan," after the mythological marine monster described in the Bible.
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