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: Geoffrey.Thomas2@btinternet.com : Here is a possible problem, one out to me recently. Hobbes - pointedly unlike Aristotle - does not regard society as natural. People don't form societies, particularly properly-organised : ones calculated systematically and comprehensively to protect self-interest, in the : kind of natural Aristotelian progression by which acorns become oak trees. Hobbes has : the whole experience of the English civil wars and, in some ways more important : (as my late colleague, Prof. Paul Hirst used to add), the French wars of religion, to : support his idea that a sound civil state emerges with luck and difficulty - else we're stuck : with a social jungle : 'No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. : : In a word, civil society of the kind that human beings need in order to flourish is a contingent affair - a matter of nomos (contrivance) rather than phusis (nature) in the old Greek distinction. So society is conventional. : : In what sense, then, is natural law natural ? And how can natural law guide a non-natural, : contingent thing such as society ? First some background. Hobbes is a kind of methodological : individualist. We have certain properties, qualities, attributes - call them what you will - that are part of our essential nature as individuals. Vary the social milieu as we may, they will continue to show up. They are socially independent, not socially reducible. Leviathan lists a plethora of such characteristics - : death-aversion, predominant self-interest, forwardlookingness, and so on. And crucially, among these characteristics, is rationality :the ability to ess our situation and to calculate efficient means to fully and clearly conceived ends. : : The major deliverance of natural law is that there are enormous benefits to social co-operation but that,in the absence of a supreme coercive power to enforce co-operation, we cannot get these benefits because we cannot trust one another in the generality of our relationships. : : One of the methods natural law suggests is that we should abandon the social jungle or pre-social 'state of nature', in which nobody has a right to anything, or everyone has a right to everything (the two situations are practically equivalent), and establish the absolute, irresistible power of a sovereign. The sovereign can be a single person, a group or even a democratic embly, though Hobbes makes clear his preference for a single person. Hobbes calls this a commonwealth by institution, i.e. one of deliberate establishment. But natural law also tells us that the state of nature, with its permanent risk of the ultimate evil, namely death, is to be avoided even at the cost of having a sovereign imposed on us. In this regard he talks of commonwealths by acquisition or conquest. He's just as happy with them. : : Hobbes' indifference to 'who does the ' of sovereign, so long as the is done efficiently, made him distrusted by all major political forces. A Stuart king or the invincible might of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, with his New-Model Army - it's all grist to Hobbes' mill. He just wants to ensure the conditions for civil peace. The title-page of Leviathan (1651) shows a sovereign with a remarkable likeness to Oliver Cromwell; after the Restoration in 1660, the sovereign looks like Charles II. : : In a word, society is not Aristotelianly natural; it is a contingent contrivance. But as a species we have the rationality (& natural law is a form of rationality) to see how to remedy the situation. Hobbes realises the obvious question : how can we trust the sovereign to provide the conditions of civil peace ? The quick answer is that we can't but (a) Hobbes reasons inductively that even the worst sovereigns generally produce a situation preferable to the ultimate evil of the state of nature; and (b) he acknowledges that even the sovereign is only a 'Mortall God'. Tyrannicide lurks permanently in the shadows. The sovereign who so persecutes his or her population, or some portion of it, effectively returns them to the state of nature in which they owe him no : obligation.

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