Hobbes and Security

  Through much of Leviathan, Hobbes' primary concern is with the security of the state, and the function of Sovereigns, above all else, is to provide security to subjects.  Interestingly, Leviathan is not as concerned with external threats to security so much as internal, dealing with threats to the public peace which may arise in sufficient discord to topple a government - particularly relevant for Hobbes, as he was writing during the turmoil and aftermath of a series of civil wars within England pertaining to the nature of government and fundamental rights of the King.  To protect against such bloody conflicts (which Hobbes likens to his own conceptualization of the state of nature), he insists upon the necessity of a strong Sovereign body established by covenant (social contract) amongst a society.

  For Hobbes, a Sovereign established by force is just as valid is one established by common agreement: in both cases, he argues that consent is present - in the case of force, the subjected peoples' not rising up against the new sovereign is taken as a signal of consent to rule being given to the sovereign by social contract.  Hobbes argues that this is a valid arrangement because restraints placed upon individuals by the Sovereign's laws are only artificial and may be disobeyed if desired, even if such actions would invoke a Sovereign's right to punish criminals and/or to censor dissent, having infringed upon the Sovereign's ability to promote peace and security within the state.  Hobbes differs this form of coercive government to the relationship by master and slave by claiming that no physical restraint prevents subjects from acting, so they retain their freedom in that their only restraints are those they tacitly agree to place upon themselves.  Though this argument is elegant, it seems to ignore the existence of gunpowder, ropes, and axes as the instruments of the Sovereign's will, separating consequences and punishment restraining factors with a rhetorical trick - slavery isn't denoted only through physical restraint, but fear of punishment or retribution is a unifying factor of subservience that is present among all practiced forms of slavery and here is one of the primary tools of Sovereigns in maintaining their authority.

  Here, we begin to arrive at a totalitarian conceptualization of sovereignty.  Fear and ability to do violence are the sovereign's tools in keeping their own authority, which is only granted to them by the society's members agreement to restrain themselves in certain capacities to promote the peace.  However, Hobbes maintains that the Sovereign has its own rights in pursuing the protection of that peace among his subjects to effectively render any restraints done by subjects meaningless.  In Chapter 18, when Hobbes begins to detail the rights of Sovereigns, it is noted that neither Sovereign nor Subject has the right to free themselves from the obligations of the contract (Hobbes, p. 97).   Under Hobbes conception, dissenters should yield to the majority if said majority is in support of the sovereign formed by compact, yet dissenters are not given any reflexive powers to abdicate their own portion of the contract, having provided consent to the Sovereign's rule when they bowed out to allow the contract to take form.  While Hobbes goes on to allot the powers of censorship of dissent to the Sovereign in an attempt to cover-up this weakness (Hobbes, p. 101), citing the old maxim "A kingdom divided among itself cannot stand."  In particular, this allotment of power seems contradictory to Hobbes' establishment of right to rule by contract - the value of consent is lost when the Sovereign begins to quash dissenters' complaints, creating a situation where subjects fear voicing objections to the Sovereign, and while Hobbes is mainly concerned with monarchies, seems completely at-odds with modern conceptualizations of democracies.  Yet, quashing dissent doesn't necessarily make dissenting voices become silent, and in silencing that dissent governments can find themselves creating more dissent concerning the methods employed - if these rights have been ordained to the Sovereign in order to procure security against civil wars breaking out, it's unclear by what mechanism they will actually be prevented.