Brian Hamilton-Vise

The limit of sovereign power

Alasdair MacIntyre says concerning Hobbes in A Brief History of Ethics that “the only limitations upon the obedience which the sovereign may demand is at the point where the motive for assenting to the transfer of power to the sovereign in the original contract, that is, the fear of death, becomes a motive for resisting the sovereign himself, namely at any point at which the sovereign threatens to take away one’s life” (p. 133). In other words, in Hobbes’s imagined nation, you owe the sovereign complete obedience except when the sovereign threatens your life. Since the whole point of ceding your natural rights to the sovereign was to avoid the threat of death, the whole contract is undone when the sovereign threatens you with death.

This aligns perfectly with Agamben’s reading of the paradox of sovereignty in Homo Sacer. The sovereign’s threat against your life is at once completely internal to the political agreement (i.e., the sovereign was named precisely for the purpose of wielding alone the power of life and death), and completely external to it, since for you the political agreement has entirely dissolved at the moment of the sovereign’s threat.

This is a concrete example of how, for Hobbes, the state of nature is not something simply external to the state nor certainly “before” it; the state of nature emerges at the very heart of the state whenever the sovereign threatens, just as he has been charged to do, any individual life.

3 April 2009 | Comments (0)
Tags: Giorgio Agamben, Hobbes, Philosophy, Political Theory, Politics