Social, Order, And Social Order By Thomas Hobbes

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Social order, the issue addressed by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), is the same issue that mankind is confronted with today at the local, regional, and global levels. The fact that mankind and its civilizations have tremendously developed did not guarantee the progress and continuity of a peaceful and just order of the society. The 17th century political and religious conflicts and issues provided the greatest impetus for the maturation of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, namely: the disagreement between the heirs of the monarchy, the monarchy and the rich class, the monarchy and the people concerning social welfare, and the religious controversies and divisions coming from the Protestant and Catholic rift; and most of equal importance is the …show more content…

Aristotle claimed that “the polis is one of those things that exist by nature, and man is an animal made to live in a polis.” For Aristotle, therefore, man is a political animal by nature. Society is an essential part of the natural state of man. For Hobbes, based on the meaning of equality, society as a political organization is precisely absent. He said: “States exist by convention, and conventions are manifestly man-made, so states are self-evidently artificial and thus nonnatural.” Moreover, Hobbes dissented from Aristotle on their understanding of the nature of man. Hobbes said that “men were not political by nature as bees and cattle were; their association depended on an agreement to observe justice among men who disagreed about who ought to receive what, and thus they needed common standards of right and wrong to regulate their affairs.” The origin of the society as a political organization therefore is the social …show more content…

In his book Concerning Civil Government, he claimed that “men unite into societies that they may have the united strength of the whole society to secure and defend their properties and may have standing rules to bind it by which every man may know what is his. To this end, it is that men give up all their natural power to the society they enter into, and the community put their legislative power into such hands as they think fit, with this trust, that they shall be governed by declared laws, or else their peace, right, and property will still be at the same time uncertainty as it was in the state of nature. ” In the state of nature, Locke, just like Hobbes, asserted that there is also perfect equality between and among men. Equality refers to the sameness of privileges, powers, and jurisdiction of all individuals in matters of ordering their actions and disposing of their possessions and persons as they think fit. Equality, in this case, is enriched by the concept of reciprocity. The basis of freedom, in the state of nature, is not the individual characteristics which may be present at variant between and among individuals. Rather, reciprocity as the principle of freedom refers to the common nature individual possesses in realizing whatever each individual deems necessary. Reciprocity, however, does not guarantee order and organization in the same manner as justice and law exist in a political

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