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Readers have been puzzling over Hobbes’s assertion that subjects “authorize” all the actions of their sovereign ever since he introduced this language into his theory in Leviathan . Much careful work has been done to investigate what Hobbes could have meant by authorization, and what role it might play in his political theory. Three recent strikingly original contributions by Michael J. Green, A. P. Martinich, and Michael Byron provide, albeit in very different ways, fertile resources for advancing our understanding. Pointing to the implications of subjects’ authorization of their sovereign, Hobbes emphasizes that subjects cannot legitimately complain that the sovereign’s action is an injustice or injury to themselves because no one can be unjust to himself, and that in seeking to punish their sovereign they would be unjustly punishing it for what they themselves have done. Commentators, including these three innovators, have naturally assumed that Hobbes paired moral responsibility with authorship and ownership, as we do. Martinich writes, for example, that “the attractiveness of authorization… is that the acceptance of the government, and thereby responsibility for its actions, is… properly attributed to the subjects”. Green writes that typically, “my authorization… [has] made me responsible for the representative’s actions”,
Hobbes Studies – Brill
Published: Oct 25, 2016
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