Normality and Coercion: Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls

Using Hobbes theory of the Leviathan replacing the ‘state of nature’, what is his conception of normativity and coercion? Discuss three writers from different disciplines who change and update these conceptions and the relationship between normativity and coercion.

The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is now widely regarded as one of a handful of truly great political philosophers, whose masterwork Leviathan rivals in significance the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls. Hobbes is famous for his early and elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons. He is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power. While his methodological innovation had a profound constructive impact on subsequent work in political philosophy, his substantive conclusions have served mostly as a foil for the development of more palatable philosophical positions.

The absolute sovereign must be obeyed – that seems to be the Hobbes’s message. If the absolute sovereign is the pre-condition for the enjoyment of individual liberty, it is important for Hobbes to instill in the subjects a sense of loyalty to the sovereign, so they do not do anything to destabilize him. This is the issue of political obligation.

According to many theorists, the basis of the long term stability of any government is the obligation its people feel to obey its laws. Obligation being a moral concept, ...

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...of action of any of their number, is self-protection. … [An individual] cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.’

In treating coercion expansively, Mill clearly proposed to catch various diverse courses in which influential executors could practice compelling power on others plus the utilization of energy, roughness, and dangers thereof. Thus, case in point, Mill proposes that the power of lawful punishments regularly lives more in the stigma they connect than the genuine disciplines they apply.