This chapter explores the legal and philosophy of Hobbes. It covers foundational assumptions; ‘man’s natural condition’ or the state of nature; exit from the state of nature and entry into the civil condition; the social contract; the sovereign’s powers and the form and content of government and law; and whether Hobbes’s political philosophy is liberal and suitable for our times.
Chapter
10. The Legal and Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes
J. E. Penner and E. Melissaris
Chapter
12. John Rawls’ Political Liberalism
J. E. Penner and E. Melissaris
This chapter explores John Rawls’s political liberalism, a contemporary reworking of the idea of the social contract and one which straddles the boundary between Hobbesian rationality and Kantian reasonableness. The discussions cover the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’; the ‘original position’ and Rawls’s political constructivism; the principles of justice; the stability of the liberal State; the stages of application of the political conception of justice; and justice and liberal legitimacy.
Chapter
1. Defining the Constitution?
This chapter identifies evaluative criteria that readers may wish to keep in mind when considering the description and analysis of the United Kingdom’s current constitutional arrangements presented in the rest of the book. The chapter begins by exploring what we might regard from a contemporary perspective as the essential features of the governmental systems adopted in a ‘democratic’ state. In order to illustrate the very contested nature of this concept of ‘democracy’, the chapter presents and analyses several hypothetical examples of what we might (or might not) regard as acceptable forms of governance, and explores the the notion of a country’s constitution being properly described as as a social and political contract formulated by its citizens. The chapter concludes by examining briefly the solutions adopted by the American revolutionaries to resolve the constitutional difficulties they faced when the United States became an independent country.
