2. Hobbes speaks of the sovereign. Who or what is the sovereign? Is it the same as a king (who was called the sovereign)? What are the limits of the sovereign's authority? Is Hobbes an apologist for dictators?
The sovereign may be a king, but is not synonymous with one; rather, Hobbes defines the sovereign as some common power, made up of one person or many, to which people divulge some of their natural rights and power (115). A society’s common rules of what is considered good and evil, known as civil laws, are enforced by the sovereign (xxxv), and the sovereign’s power is derived from the consent of the people in giving up some of their natural rights (115). One submits to the sovereign in exchange for the promise of peace and safety, something that is not available in the state of nature. The limitations and problems of Hobbes’ theory of the sovereign lie in the tendency of his ideas to lean towards the justification of dictatorship. In his desire to avoid the state of nature at all costs, Hobbes “justifies the exercise of virtual dictatorship by the sovereign power” (xxxvi). Resistance against a dictator is almost never justified, except for in the most extreme of circumstances. Because the population of a given commonwealth is bound by its covenant, “subjects cannot change the form of government” (115) and cannot “punish” the sovereign for any of his actions (118). To Hobbes, therefore, anything is preferable to anarchy, even the worst of dictatorships who cause “the power and honour of subjects [to] vanish in the presence of the power sovereign” (121).
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