The Interplay of Civil and Natural Law in Hobbes’ Philosophy

Thomas Hobbes wrote during one of the most violent periods in English history. The English Civil War shaped his entire political vision, convincing him that the worst possible condition for human beings is the absence of a settled authority. Out of this conviction came one of the most influential arguments in political theory: that law itself is the price we pay for peace. Yet Hobbes was working with two very different ideas of law at once. There is the natural law, which reason discovers, and the civil law, which the sovereign commands. Understanding how these two relate to each other, and why Hobbes ultimately folds one into the other, is the key to grasping his whole theory of the state.

Two kinds of law in Hobbes’ thought 🔗

Before we can see how civil and natural law interact, we need to be clear about what each one means for Hobbes. They begin from completely different sources, even though Hobbes eventually insists they are bound together.

The laws of nature as dictates of reason 🔗

For Hobbes, the laws of nature are not commands handed down by God or written in any statute book. They are conclusions that reason arrives at when a person thinks carefully about how to stay alive and secure. The most basic of these is the rule to seek peace wherever it can be obtained, and to defend oneself by any available means when it cannot. From this flows a second law: that a person should be willing to give up their unlimited right to everything, provided others do the same, so that everyone can enjoy security. A third law, central to the entire argument, holds that people must keep the covenants they make.

Hobbes lists nineteen laws of nature in total, but as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, it is really the first two or three that do the political work, while the remaining ones largely reduce to a familiar moral formula of treating others as you would wish to be treated. These laws describe what reason recommends for a peaceful life. They are moral guides, not yet enforceable rules.

Civil law as the command of the sovereign 🔗

Civil law is entirely different in origin. It does not come from individual reasoning but from the will of the sovereign, the authority created when people agree to leave the state of nature. Hobbes is blunt about this. As Britannica explains, he defined law in general as command rather than counsel, and treated civil laws as the rules the commonwealth has ordered through speech, writing, or some other clear sign of the sovereign’s will. Because law is a sign of that will, Hobbes stressed that these signs must be public and intelligible enough for ordinary citizens to understand and obey.

This is why many scholars credit Hobbes as a founder of legal positivism, the view that the validity of a law depends on its source rather than its moral content. Legal positivism holds that law exists because of social facts such as acts of legislation, not because it matches some higher moral standard. Hobbes’ famous definition of law as the command of the sovereign sits at the root of this tradition.

Why civil society needs civil law 🔗

To see why Hobbes insists on civil law at all, we have to return to his picture of life without it. In the state of nature, there is no common power, no settled property, and no shared standard of right and wrong. Each person has a right to everything, including another person’s body, which means no one is truly secure. Hobbes describes this condition in his most quoted phrase: life there is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The laws of nature, on their own, cannot fix this. Reason may tell every person to seek peace and keep their promises, but reason gives no guarantee that others will do the same. In a dangerous world, behaving peacefully while everyone around you cheats would simply get you killed. The laws of nature bind in the conscience, as an inner commitment, but they cannot be safely acted upon until there is some power to ensure that everyone complies together.

This is the gap that civil law fills. People escape the state of nature through a social contract, mutually agreeing to surrender their unlimited natural liberty and submit to a sovereign who can enforce common rules. The sovereign creates an enforcement mechanism that makes promises reliable. Once a power exists that can punish those who break faith, the fear of punishment outweighs the temptation to cheat, and peaceful behaviour finally becomes rational for everyone. Civil law, in short, is what turns the good advice of natural law into a workable social order.

How natural law is subsumed under civil law 🔗

Here we reach the heart of the matter. Once civil society is formed, Hobbes does not keep natural and civil law as two separate, competing systems. Instead, he merges them. In a striking passage from Leviathan, he argues that civil and natural law are not different kinds of law but different parts of the same law. One part is written and published, which we call civil. The other is unwritten and known through reason, which we call natural. In the commonwealth, both are equally law and both carry the authority of the sovereign.

Obedience to civil law becomes a natural duty 🔗

Hobbes makes the connection tighter still. Every subject in a commonwealth has covenanted to obey the civil law, either by agreeing with one another to set up a common representative or by submitting to a conqueror in exchange for their life. Because the third law of nature commands people to keep their covenants, obeying the civil law is itself a requirement of natural law. The two systems no longer pull in different directions. To follow the sovereign’s commands is to fulfil what reason already demanded.

The sovereign as the ultimate interpreter 🔗

This merger has a crucial consequence. In the state of nature, each person was their own judge of what the laws of nature required. Inside the commonwealth, that private judgement is dangerous, because disagreement about what reason demands would reproduce the very conflict the state was meant to end. So Hobbes hands the authority to interpret and apply the natural law to the sovereign. Even though a law of nature is reasonable in itself, it becomes binding law only because the sovereign power stands behind it. The sovereign’s interpretation, not the individual’s, becomes the final word on what justice requires.

Law, justice, and the authority of the sovereign 🔗

The subsuming of natural law under civil law also transforms what justice means. For Hobbes, ideas of just and unjust cannot exist without a coercive power to enforce covenants, and such a power appears only with the creation of the commonwealth. As an overview of legal positivism records, Hobbes held that nothing can be reputed unjust unless it is contrary to some law, and that the laws are themselves the measure of just and unjust. Justice, on this view, is keeping the covenant and obeying the sovereign; injustice is breaking it.

This gives the sovereign an extraordinary position. Because the sovereign makes the law, the sovereign is not bound by it in the way subjects are, and can release itself from any particular law when it chooses. The rights and freedoms that subjects enjoy are not natural entitlements held against the state but liberties that exist only within the silence of the law. As one analysis of Hobbes’ philosophy of law puts it, law was for him the primary instrument by which a sovereign serves the central ends of government, which are peace and the personal security of citizens.

A bridge between natural law and command theory 🔗

It would be a mistake, though, to read Hobbes as a pure command theorist who cares only about brute force. His position is more subtle. As scholarship from Cambridge University Press observes, Hobbes does not fit neatly into the later positivist mould of thinkers like Bentham and Austin, who defined law purely as the command of a sovereign backed by sanctions. For Hobbes, coercion is not part of the definition of law; obligation grounded in prior consent is. The duty to obey rests on the covenant the subject has already made, not merely on the threat of punishment.

This is what makes Hobbes such a distinctive figure. His theory of law, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, sits at the historical root of legal positivism, yet it weaves together themes from both the natural-law and command-theory traditions. The laws of nature supply the rational foundation, explaining why a person would consent to authority in the first place. The civil law supplies the enforceable structure, giving those rational principles teeth. Natural law tells you why to obey; civil law tells you what to obey.

The lasting significance of Hobbes’ synthesis 🔗

Hobbes’ decision to absorb natural law into civil law was not a casual move. It solved a problem that had troubled political thinkers for centuries: how to reconcile the idea of a higher moral law with the practical need for a single, undisputed authority. By making the sovereign the interpreter and enforcer of natural law, Hobbes ensured that there could be no rival standard to which subjects might appeal in order to justify rebellion. The result is a powerful argument for political obedience, but also one that concentrates enormous authority in a single source.

The tension this creates has occupied scholars ever since. Hobbes does preserve one right that can never be surrendered, the right to self-preservation, which means a subject is not obliged to obey a command to harm themselves. This sliver of retained natural right sits uneasily alongside the otherwise absolute authority of the sovereign, and debates about how far it extends continue today. What is not in doubt is the originality of the synthesis. Hobbes took the unwritten dictates of reason and the written commands of power and bound them into a single legal order, anchored at every point in the will of the sovereign.

What do you think? If obedience to the civil law is genuinely a requirement of natural law, can a subject ever appeal to natural law to resist an unjust command, or has Hobbes closed off that escape route entirely? And in a modern constitutional democracy, where courts and constitutions limit the lawmaker, does Hobbes’ claim that the sovereign is the sole source of justice still hold any force?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-of-nature-political-theory
3. https://iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/
4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-law/Thomas-Hobbes
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism
6. https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
7. https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/chapter26.html
8. https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/jurisprudence/legal-positivism.php
9. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hobbes-and-the-law/hobbes-on-the-authority-of-law/846544BAB41EA3A0629F5EA9F74EE563
10. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-positivism/