The legal philosophy of Thomas Hobbes
pp. 379-401
in: Enrico Pattaro, Damiano Canale, Hasso Hofmann, Patrick Riley (eds), A treatise of legal philosophy and general jurisprudence 9-10, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
It is best to view Hobbes (1588–1679) as the father of modern "legal positivism"—the doctrine that (in Hobbes' words) "where there is no law there is no justice," and that the so-called 'state of nature" is a moral vacuum in which force and fraud are "cardinal virtues' (Hobbes 1957, 307, 86). Hobbes' main view in Leviathan—setting aside equivocal utterances about natural laws as "eternal and immutable" dictates of reason (in a Platonic-Ciceronian manner)—is that the state of nature is a 'state of war" in which life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short";
