Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 67

Out of this welter of speculation only a few names can be mentioned here. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of them was Thomas Hobbes, whose greatest work, The Leviathan,¹ appeared in 1651. Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, he entirely rejected the study of history as having any bearing on political science; instead, he pinned his faith to “geometry, which is the only science that it hath hitherto pleased God to bestow on mankind”—words which have a strangely familiar sound in these latter days. His outlook was entirely materialistic. All knowledge is derived through the senses; every idea is the result of an effect produced upon an organ of sense by the motion of an external object; felicity means success in getting what one wants. Were it not for civil government, life would consist of the ruthless competition of unmoral men for desirable things, and would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. It is only the tremendous power of the State which protects the natural man against himself and his fellows, and from this power are derived the ideas of justice and property—for in the pre-civil State “that only is a man’s that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it”. Where other thinkers had conceived of society as involving a contract between ruler and subject, Hobbes devised a completely different scheme. According to his view, helpless and miserable mankind made a contract, every man with another, to submit to a ruler whom they all clothed with authority to govern them. This ruler was no party to the contract and is therefore bound by no limitations. Consequently it is impossible to talk about a sovereign having broken his contract with the nation (which was a common argument in the seventeenth century), for no such contract existed. Nor is there any justification for resistance to the sovereign. We seem to see in these theories a deep impatience with the turmoils of the Stuart period. Neither the antiquarianism of Parliament nor the mysticism of divine right had any meaning to the dry, penetrating, but narrow mind of Hobbes. The troubles of the Commonwealth, deeply involved as they were with religion, are reflected in his treatment of the Church. His own position seems to be that of a deist. He recommends that there be but one Church in a State, and that under the absolute control of the sovereign leviathan; he even asserts that the sovereign necessarily has full authority to preach, baptise and administer the sacraments, and that the clergy only perform these functions by delegation from the State, whose will is the source of both temporal and spiritual law. It is only natural that a century which was so animated by sincere religious dissension should either neglect or revile a thinker at once so original and so cynical.¹