The hallmark of Enlightenment thought is that of the social contract, that invisible pact between individuals upon which societies are built and laws made. Common to all Enlightenment thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries was the acknowledgement that societies derived the laws that ordered these social contracts from the Laws of Nature. However, these Laws of Nature could be interpreted very differently when applied to the political world. Writing on opposite ends of the Enlightenment, the Englishman Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 17th century) and the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (On the Social Contract, 18th century) embody this understanding of social contract theory in their conceptions of political order.

Hobbes’ Sovereign Power

The whole point of Hobbes’ Leviathan is to build a case for the supremacy of government that is embodied in the rule of one man. While he gives some credence to other forms of government, Hobbes clearly advocates for monarchy in Part II, chapter xix, where he spends most of the chapter describing the benefits of monarchy, playing down its shortcomings by finding similar shortcomings in other forms of government, thus advocating monarchy through a cost-benefit scenario. Hobbes, writing in the context the English Civil War, contrives the Sovereign power of the state as being that power of the combined rights and liberties surrendered by the people in gathering together under a social contract and choosing the individual, or party, who will perform the role of sovereign, with the powers of providing for the “peace and common defense” of the people ( Part II, chapter xvii, p. 13). After defining the person of the Sovereign, Hobbes uses the eighteenth chapter of Part II to lay out the parameters of the Sovereign, and the unique rights they enjoy. Of course, this is almost laughable that any parameters be put upon a Sovereign who is incapable of being punished by his subjects, thus being above the law (ch. xviii, p 7), and who possesses the carte blanche right “to do whatsoever he shall think necessary to be done [for peace and defense]” (Part II, chapter xviii, p. 8).