Order Overwhelms Freedom

Hobbes is an integral part of modern liberal political philosophy in tracing its theoretical roots.In leviathan,Hobbes starts with the absolute freedom of human beings in the state of nature,and ends with the establishment of absolute sovereignty to ensure the peace and order of society.He tries to find a balance between individual freedom and social order,so as to achieve the goal of guaranteeing people's life safety.Among them,absolute sovereignty is the plan proposed by Hobbes to end the war and move towards peace and security in the era of war in which he lived.So Hobbes' concept of sovereignty was put forward to find peace and security.So before he can explain the concept of sovereignty,Hobbes needs to explain to us why humans are at war,and whether his own era of war is an accident of human society.In his early translation of the peloponnesian war,Hobbes told us that his understanding of the human phenomenon of war is that war is a long-term human phenomenon.And to find the cause of human warfare,Hobbes thinks we should start with human nature.From the view of human nature,the reason of people's war is to provide a foundation of justification for the establishment of sovereignty,which is to answer the primary question of political philosophy — the justification of political rule.In the case of Hobbes,the question is what is the justification of absolute sovereignty.Hobbes postulated that in a "state of nature" in which human power(both physical and intellectual)was equal and there was no coercion of any political authority,human nature unfolded according to the principle of self-interest.The aim of self-interest gave rise to three passions:rivalry,suspicion,and vanity,of which the passion of vanity was the chief,and excited the pursuit of power,and began the journey of saving one's life in the state of war in which no one could defend himself.It is the threat of violent death that makes people realize that the most important and fundamental self-interest is survival.Therefore,under the principle of life first,reason gives the law of self-preservation — The natural law.The law of nature is a simple and feasible way out of the state of nature in which all men are at war,it requires people to seek and abide by peace,and to pool their natural rights by contract and empower a third party outside the contract — the sovereign — to secure peace at home and defend against aggression abroad.Because of his pessimistic view of the human nature of his subjects and his full trust in the sovereign,Hobbes believed that sovereignty must be granted with absoluteness,otherwise the sovereign would beunable to fulfill his mission of safeguarding the peace of his country and the security of his subjects.That is,in the sense of preserving life,Hobbes gives his solution to social order and individual liberty: order overrides freedom.If we think of the social order as a symbol of sovereignty,and think of individual liberty as a symbol of human rights,we can say that in Hobbes' view,sovereignty overrides human rights.But this should not be the intention of Hobbes' theory.Hobbes expressed the compatible view of order and freedom in the discussion of "the compatibility of fear and freedom",and completed the defense of the absoluteness of sovereignty in the way that freedom integrates with inevitability.Although Hobbes took a different view of the human nature of his subjects from that of the sovereign,this was not a successful argument for absolute sovereignty.But his solution to freedom and necessity succeeds in convincing us that the absoluteness of sovereignty is necessary and inevitability.In this sense,there is a theoretical basis for interpreting Hobbes' absolute sovereignty as the triumph of order over freedom.On the basis of the previous studies,this paper starts from the clarification of the basic concept of Hobbes' theory of human nature,reproduces the justification for the establishment of Hobbes' sovereignty,and finally looks at the absoluteness of Hobbes' sovereignty with a sympathetic attitude.