Home/Hobbes

Hobbes

Introduction The Greek polis and the Roman civitas represent some of the most distinctive forms of political and social organization in history. Yet, they are often misunderstood when examined through the lens of the modern state. Modern conceptions of the state—centralized, bureaucratic, and sovereign—emerged from the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Thinkers like …

Habermas, on the other hand, talks more about procedural popular sovereignty. The difference with Arendt lies in his understanding of autonomy. Whereas Arendt, like Carl Schmitt, identifies political autonomy with a specific public space in which citizens confront each other face to face, for Habermas, Kelsen, and Luhmann autonomy is a characteristic of a specific …

Kant’s conception of God was the author of divine commandments. Human obligation towards one’s fellow being started from these commandments, which Kant called “statutory commandments.” But the actual legislators of moral commandments were human beings themselves: God was the author of divine legislation, but moral legislation was self-created and self-directed by human conscience.