Political Obligation as Prudential Obligation in the Political Philosophical Thought of Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’ best-known work, the obligation to obey the state assumes a rational or prudential character because of the philosophical and epistemological theories from which this thinker has conceived the human nature. Those principles are related to a mechanical vision of the world in which the obedience to the sovereign is explained only as a need to conserve the life motion.According to Hobbes’ view, transcendental values do not exist as a moral foundation like in Aristothelic-Tomist School, neither categorical imperative like in Kantian ethics; only the passions and the universal motion principle constitute the elements which make possible the logic of the political obligation in his theory.