Table Of ContentHobbes on Legal Authority and Political Obligation
Hobbes on Legal Authority
and Political Obligation
Luciano V enezia
National Scientific and Technical Research Council – National University of
Quilmes, Argentina
© Luciano Venezia 2015
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First published 2015 by
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For Lau, with love
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Note xii
1 Introduction 1
1 .1 The project 2
1 .2 Method 8
1 .3 Strategy 13
1 .4 Textual evidence 1 6
2 Coercion, Rational Self-Interest, and Obligation 19
2 .1 Conflict in the state of nature 20
2 .2 A nti-social passions and sanctions for
non-compliance 25
2 .3 L egal coercion, private good, and the
common good 2 8
2 .4 The end of the story? 30
2 .5 Lloyd’s account 3 4
3 The Authority of Law 41
3 .1 The concept of authority 43
3 .2 Even for the rationally and morally perfect 4 6
3 .3 The command theory of law 5 4
3 .4 Arbitration 5 7
3 .5 Beliefs or actions? 6 0
4 Political Obligation 63
4 .1 Egoism 6 4
4 .2 Moral reasons in Hobbes? 69
4 .3 The theory of political obligation 7 6
4 .4 The mutual containment thesis 84
4 .5 The rationale for political disobedience 9 1
5 Contractarianism 9 3
5 .1 Hobbes’ account: an interpretation 9 4
5 .2 What difference does the sovereign make? 105
vii
viii Contents
5 .3 Contractual obligation: prudential or
deontological? 110
5 .4 Obligation and reason 119
6 The Hobbesian Analysis of Contracts under Coercion:
A Critique 126
6 .1 Hobbes on voluntariness, coercion, and obligation 1 28
6 .2 Coercion, rationality, and voluntariness 130
6 .3 Rationality without voluntariness 134
6 .4 Conclusion 141
7 Final Remarks 143
Bibliography 148
Index 157
Acknowledgments
This project started as a doctoral dissertation at the University of
Buenos Aires and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social
Sciences in Paris. Afterwards, I worked on the draft during a series
of post-doctoral research stays at the University of Buenos Aires, the
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the Raymond Aron Center for
Sociological and Political Studies in Paris. Finally, I completed the
definitive version during my first year as Assistant Research Fellow at
the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina.
The generous help of several people and institutions was essential to
bringing this project to fruition. I would like to express my gratitude
to them all.
First, I would like to thank Claudio Amor, Luc Foisneau, and Andrés
Rosler, who supervised my dissertation and were a continuous source
of useful comments and suggestions. I am also greatly indebted to
their written work. Andrés Rosler’s Political Authority and Obligation
in Aristotle , as well as his papers on Hobbes’ political and legal philos-
ophy, were very important for my own work, as were Luc Foisneau’s
works on Hobbes.
I would also like to thank Leiser Madanes, Pasquale Pasquino, and
Horacio Spector for their comments. I am indebted to Emmanuel
Picavet for his valuable remarks on the preliminary report for the
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.
I especially acknowledge the interest in my work shown by Thomas
Christiano and Gerald F. Gaus. I first discussed with them an early
project on Hobbes’ legal philosophy while studying at the University
of Arizona. Both of them also gave me very useful feedback at an
advanced stage of the book draft.
I am indebted to numerous other people, including Timo
Airaksinen, Noel Boulting, Philippe Crignon, Miranda del Corral,
David Dyzenhaus, William A. Edmundson, Daniel Eggers, Eldon
J. Eisenach, Paula Gaido, David Gauthier, Pedro Francés Gómez,
Kinch Hoekstra, Matthias Kiesselbach, George Klosko, María Lukac
de Stier, James R. Martel, José Luis Martí, Johan Olsthoorn, Thomas
Pink, John T. Sanders, Peter Schröder, Johann P. Sommerville, Pablo
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