Political Philosophy in a Legal Idiolect. Hobbes on Rights, Contracts, and Laws

Abstract

Hobbes uses fundamental legal concepts (e.g., rights, contract, laws of nature) to introduce ‘Leviathan’, i.e., overarching state authority. How does this relate to the received view (and Hobbes’s explicit thesis) that law makes no sense as long as the state is not conceptualized first? The paper argues that these concepts are governed by a philosophical rather than a legal logic. This philosophical logic is to bolster up political reflexivity, i.e., the phenomenon of political agents attributing first-person ascriptions to themselves, either in the singular (in the case of rights), or in the plural (in the case of contracts), or in both (in the case of laws). Thus, these concepts should be regarded as quasi-, rather than genuinely, legal. The received view emerges as the preferable one; at bottom, Hobbes is not a philosophy of law applied to the political but rather the other way around.