A Timeline of Human Rights
(Under Construction)
1651
Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan
Filed under: Ideas
He would have scoffed at the idea of human rights, but Hobbes’ contribution to its development was the idea that political power derives from people.
The Hobbesian worldview is in many ways a dark and cynical one. Apologists for tyrants are fond of quoting the man. So what does he have to do with the development of human rights?
As Geoffrey Robertson1 has put it, with 1651’s Leviathan Hobbes “broke the nexus between God and State, because he recognized the true source of political power in the consent of the people.” Human nature is to fight, kill, rape, steal, so individuals forfeited their autonomy to leaders who could protect them—from each other and from outside forces.
For Hobbes, power to govern, once granted, could never be taken back; the terms of the agreement, moreover, could not be renegotiated or altered. But his view that political power, at least in its essential form, flowed from the people rather than God, reflected a new way of thinking that is essential to human rights.
1 Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, (Revised Edition, The New Press, 2002) pp 4.