Comment: “Hobbes relieved sovereignty completely from the disabilities which Bodin 4. had inconsistently left standing.” (Sabine) (1998)
George H. Sabine passes this verdict in the chapter on Thomas Hobbes of A History of Political Theory (1937). It measures Leviathan (1651) against Jean Bodin‘s Six Livres de la République (1576), the first systematic theory of sovereignty. Sabine is right about the logic of legal supremacy. “Completely” overstates it, because Hobbes moved the limits on sovereignty rather than abolishing them.
Bodin’s Sovereign and Its Disabilities
Bodin, a politique writing amid the French Wars of Religion, defined sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth. His Latin edition (1586) called it supreme power over citizens and subjects, unbound by laws. Its first mark is making law without anyone’s consent. Yet he left four limits in place:
- Divine and natural law, including the duty to keep covenants.
- Leges imperii, the fundamental laws of France: the Salic law of succession and the inalienability of the royal domain.
- Property: the family’s goods were its own, so taxes required the consent of the Estates.
- The family, a natural unit older than the state.
Sabine’s charge is inconsistency. If the sovereign is the source of law, a law he cannot change must come from elsewhere. Its interpreter would be the real sovereign.
How Hobbes Removed Them
| Bodin’s limit | Hobbes’s treatment |
|---|---|
| Natural and divine law | Laws of nature are only theorems of reason; the sovereign alone interprets them |
| Fundamental laws | Only the sovereign’s command is law; he is not bound by his own laws |
| Property and taxation | No mine and thine before the sovereign; property excludes other subjects, not him |
| Church | Erastian: the church is a corporation under the civil power |
| Intermediate bodies | Only individuals covenant; corporations are worms in the entrails of the commonwealth |
The key is individualism. Since only individuals exist before the covenant, no family, estate or church brings prior rights into the state. Authorisation means the sovereign cannot wrong the subject, and, being no party to the covenant, he cannot breach it. Divided or mixed government means civil war.
Was the Relief Complete?
- Hobbes kept limits of his own. The right to resist those who come to kill a man cannot be alienated, and obligation lasts no longer than the sovereign’s power to protect. The sovereign remains accountable to God for salus populi. These limits bind in fact and conscience, not in law.
- The juristic completion came later. John Austin (The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, 1832) defined law as the command of a determinate superior who is habitually obeyed.
- The pluralist reply. Harold J. Laski and Léon Duguit denied that any real state possessed such power. Herbert L. A. Hart (The Concept of Law, 1961) showed that command theory cannot explain power-conferring rules.
The Indian Anchor
India’s Constitution is nearer to Bodin, with the missing judge added. Parliament’s amending power is bound by the basic structure (Kesavananda Bharati, 1973), which works as a modern set of fundamental laws. The Supreme Court enforces it, the rival authority Hobbes feared.
Conclusion
Sabine’s verdict holds as legal theory: Hobbes gave the first consistent account of legal sovereignty. Politically, the disabilities survived as the conditions of the sovereign’s existence rather than as rules against him. Constitutionalism has since turned them back into enforceable law.