Interpretations of Hobbes: avtoritarianism, individualism, authorisation

Abstract

Author presents a historical overview of main interpretations of Hobbes’s political theory from his own time up to the present day and asserts that most of them are characterised by one-sided or one-dimensional view of Hobbes and his theory and mainly are grouped into two opposed groups, regarding Hobbes as a theorist of absolutism and political power or as a theorist of individualism and natural law respectively. None of these groups of interpreters could comprehend Hobbes’s philosophy as a whole, since both overlook the meaning of the mediating term between these two extremes, namely his theory of authorisation. Author claims that Hobbes is not a theorist of power and authority, but of empowerment or authorisation. Precisely this theory of authorisation, which includes a Kantian, autonomously grounded theory of citizen’s obligation to obey the sovereign power, represents the basic aspect of Hobbes’s political theory, but because of the alienation and subjection to the automatism of civil laws it brings about, the same way as Kantian theory of categorical imperative and Lacanian theory of signifier do, is the cause of the discontent of Hobbes’s interpreters.