Natural Sovereignty and Omnipotence in Hobbes’s Leviathan

Tür:

Kitap

Yazar:

A. P. Martinich

Yayın yılı:

2018

Yayıncı:

Oxford University Press

According to Thomas Hobbes, God is a natural sovereign because he is omnipotent. This claim is part of the general political philosophy he presents in Part Two of <italic>Leviathan</italic>. The assertion of God’s sovereignty complements Hobbes’s earlier claim that the laws of nature are commanded by God, speaking through reason. For Hobbes as for some of his other contemporaries, understanding the properties of God as absolute sovereign helps to illuminate the properties of an absolute, human sovereign. When a king was thought of as God’s vicegerent or representative, the king’s attributes were thought to be reflections of or approximations to God’s sovereign attributes. Hobbes’s civil sovereign is modelled on the divine sovereign as represented in the Old Testament. Hobbes favoured some of the psalms; but he probably had other familiar biblical texts in mind as well.

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