THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of setting up a state, then this basic act is itself a democratic one; ‘But we understand that to be the will of the council, which is the will of the major part of those men of
whom the council consists’ (De cive, 5, 7). The nullity to which all are reduced in the face of absolute state authority further breaks down feudal class differences: all
people are equal, because all people are nothing in the face of the ruler; the generality of the law proves complete in this paradoxical way. But above all, Hobbes did
not portray absolute kingship as demonstrable, but solely the absolute sovereignty and unity of state authority. The latter was feasible even in republican form; even in
his work ‘De cive’, Hobbes had compared the democratic state with the aristocratic one as having fundamentally equal rights; also the definition of monarchy as
received wolfish nature was incompatible with anointed dignity by the grace of God. So strangely did the bourgeoisie smooth the way for itself here, interpreting those
who ruled over it totally cynically; and Leviathan, the state, is a monster. The enmity of the nobility and the Church towards Hobbes certainly did not prevent all future
Natural Right from appearing as anti­Hobbes in its wording. This is clearly the case even in Locke (Civil Government, 1689); he returns to Grotius: the origin of society,
and therefore the measure of its correctness, is once again mutual goodwill, not mutual fear. Here, in Locke, not in Rousseau, the natural goodness of man is
monstrously exaggerated, one does not know how an emergency and despotic state could ever arise at all. Where Hobbes introduces a wolfish capitalism, which did
not even exist in his day, into his portrayal of the state of nature, Locke introduces a utopia which is reminiscent of that of More; the state of nature is ‘peace, good will,
mutual aid, protection’. This felicitous element continues to have a normative influence in the established legal position and above it: ‘The state of nature has a law of
nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law [again a literal agreement with the logos­nature of the Stoics] teaches all mankind, who will
but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.’ Clearly nature is a guiding idea throughout
here, but still not a contrasting idea to bourgeois society. Also the whole nation, undiminished so to speak, is still by no means the vehicle of the ideal of rational law but
only a representative part of it, in classes or in a parliament built on the class system.
Only in the final, fieriest figure of classic Natural Right, in Rousseau (Contrat social, 1762), does the nation appear with total power, undivided into classes,
unrepresented. The citizen wanted to see that things were right himself, did not wish for anybody to take his place any more. As