La concezione dell’obbligo giuridico di Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

In this work, I will critically engage with Thomas Hobbes’ account of legal obligation. The main claim I set out to defend is the thesis that Hobbes conceptualizes legal obligation as rationally justified imperative. This means that a legal obligation is presented as a command of a sovereign power that is intrinsically (and not merely contingently) rational. That is, for Hobbes, practical rationality, in its prudential (vis-à-vis moral) instantiation, is an essential dimension of legal obligation. On this basis, I suggest that Hobbes’ account of legal obligation is best interpreted as a variant of the so-called normative model. More specifically, Hobbes theorizes a rationalist version of the normative model that, on the one hand, is rooted in the naturalist tradition of the Middle Age and, on the other hand, is conceptually distinguishable from the views of legal obligation associated with the legal theories of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin.