Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Locke; Ggs zu Hobbes; begrenzte Macht der Regierung

Kurzinhalt: He tries to show that Hobbes's principle--the right of self-preservation ... far from favoring absolute government, requires limited government.

Textausschnitt: 231a It is on the basis of Hobbes's view of the law of nature that Locke opposes Hobbes's conclusions. He tries to show that Hobbes's principle--the right of self-preservation--far from favoring absolute government, requires limited government. Freedom, "freedom from arbitrary, absolute power," is "the fence" to self-preservation. Slavery is therefore against natural law except as a substitute for capital punishment. Nothing which is incompatible with the basic right of self-preservation, and hence nothing to which a rational creature cannot be supposed to have given free consent, can be just; hence civil society or government cannot be established lawfully by force or conquest: consent alone "did or could give beginning to any lawful government in the world." For the same reason Locke condemns absolute monarchy or, more precisely, "absolute arbitrary power ... of any one or more" as well as "governing without settled standing laws."1 In spite of the limitations which Locke demands, the commonwealth remains for him, as it was for Hobbes, "the mighty leviathan": in entering civil society, "men give up all their natural power to the society which they enter into." Just as Hobbes did, so Locke admits only one contract: the contract of union which every individual makes with every other individual of the same multitude is identical with the contract of subjection. Just as Hobbes did, so Locke teaches that, by virtue of the fundamental contract, every man "puts himself under an obligation to everyone of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it"; that, therefore, the fundamental contract establishes immediately an unqualified democracy; that this primary democracy may by majority vote either continue itself or transform itself into another form of government; and that the social contract is therefore in fact identical with a contract of subjection to the "sovereign" (Hobbes) or to the "supreme power" (Locke) rather than to society.2 Locke opposes Hobbes by teaching that wherever "the people" or "the community," i.e., the majority, have placed the supreme power, they still retain "a supreme power to remove or alter" the established government, i.e., they still retain a right of revolution.3 But this power (which is normally dormant) does not qualify the subjection of the individual to the community or society. On the contrary, it is only fair to say that Hobbes stresses more strongly than does Locke the individual's right to resist society or the government whenever his self-preservation is endangered.4 (Fs)

233a Locke would nevertheless have been justified in contending that the mighty leviathan, as he had constructed it, offered a greater guarantee for the individual's self-preservation than Hobbes's Leviathan. The individual's right of resistance to organized society, which Hobbes had stressed and which Locke did not deny, is an ineffectual guaranty for the individual's self-preservation.1 Since the only alternative to pure anarchy--to a condition in which everyone's self-preservation is in continual danger--is that "men give up all their natural power to the society which they enter into"; the only effective guaranty for the rights of the individual is that society be so constructed as to be incapable of oppressing its members: only a society or a government thus constructed is legitimate or in accordance with natural law; only such a society can justly demand that the individual surrender to it all his natural power. According to Locke, the best institutional safeguards for the rights of the individuals are supplied by a constitution that, in practically all domestic matters, strictly subordinates the executive power (which must be strong) to law, and ultimately to a well-defined legislative assembly. The legislative assembly must be limited to the making of laws as distinguished from "extemporary, arbitrary decrees"; its members must be elected by the people for fairly short periods of tenure and therefore be "themselves subject to the laws they have made"; the electoral system must take account of both numbers and wealth.2 For, although Locke seems to have thought that the individual's self-preservation is less seriously threatened by the majority than by monarchic or oligarchic rulers, he cannot be said to have had an implicit faith in the majority as a guarantor of the rights of the individual.3 In the passages in which he seems to describe the majority as such a guarantor, he is speaking of cases in which the individuals' self-preservation is threatened by tyrannical monarchic or oligarchic rulers and wherein, therefore, the last and only hope for the suffering individual obviously rests on the dispositions of the majority. Locke regarded the power of the majority as a check on bad government and a last resort against tyrannical government; he did not regard it as a substitute for government or as identical with government. Equality, he thought, is incompatible with civil society. The equality of all men in regard to the right of self-preservation does not obliterate completely the special right of the more reasonable men. On the contrary, the exercise of that special right is conducive to the self-preservation and happiness of all. Above all, since self-preservation and happiness require property, so much so that the end of civil society can be said to be the preservation of property, the protection of the propertied members of society against the demands of the indigent--or the protection of the industrious and rational against the lazy and quarrelsome--is essential to public happiness or the common good.4 (Fs)