Abstract
One of the premises of Hobbes’s political argument which he develops in Leviathan, Chapter 13, is his pessimistic view of the state of nature as a state of war which must be renounced at all cost. This line of approach is commonly thought to start with a false assumption. However, I regard Hobbes’s view as significant if it is meant to imply that obligations exist in the natural state which arise from the free and voluntary renunciation of man’s rights in that state. In fact, as Hobbes points out, to renounce such basic rights would mean avoidance of the original state of war; for men would then keep their promises, obey certain rules, and help to secure peace and public order by contributing to the formation of civil society. It would also follow from Hobbes’s argument that the binding force of a person’s obligation arises not so much from the dictates of a natural or conventional law as by virtue of his own free will.
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