Hobbe's Conception of the State - Essay Example

A proper insight into Hobbes’ concept of the state and its relationship with liberty, law, power and right of the State has been provided within the scope of this paper. Hobbes’ Leviathan was written and shaped in the backdrop of the Civil War that took place in America and thus the book is centred on thoughts based on the existence of a strong central or sovereign authority according to which only a single individual or body may possess all the power and impose rights on the people. Hobbes opposed these views and spoke about how life would be without such a government in place and this utopian condition was named the ‘state of nature’. . ng to Hobbes, is the perfect situation for such a society where the various people may come together in the form of a social contract and live together in what may be formed as a civil society.

A society is a place where every individual should be able to obtain his or her own rights and the law should be free and flexible enough to accommodate the needs of every individual living within that society. However, the State was not such a place and thus Hobbes longed for the non prevention of socializing among human beings and postulated a civil society. Life prior to the theory was a very anarchic form of life where there was no leadership prevalent among the people because of which Hobbes thought that things were going haywire.

Thus, he preached that there should be a sovereign authority that dictates terms because he thought that this would benefit the people at large. The social contract thus became an ‘occurrence’ as per which people came together to form a civil society or a State so that they could exercise their rights as per the law that was laid down by the contract. There were rules and regulations that bound the people from the State and curbed their rights as and when needed. Hobbes thought that this form of living at least prevented people from living in a brutish or hellish sort of place that they existed within earlier.

This therefore, led to the coming of a State or a sovereign entity which helped to protect the rights of every individual living within that society. Thus, Hobbes talked about the relationship between an absolute power that ruled the State and the State as a forum for individuals to exercise their rights within. Liberty is a very moral concept of freedom that is provided to individuals existing within a land; in this case, Hobbes thought