168 Reason and Its Rivals (ca. 1550– 1815)In itself, seeing the right of survival, or security, as a primary natural-law
right was nothing new. Aquinas had said as much. Th e key diff erence was
that, for Aquinas, self- preservation had been only one of three core natural-
law principles (the other two being the nurturing of the young and, cru-
cially, the quest for harmonious social life). For Hobbes, security was, in ef-
fect, the sole basic natural right. It authorized each individual person to take
what ever steps are necessary to preserve his existence in a turbulent world.
At the root of the Hobbesian “war of all against all” is the regrettable fact
that opinions of people will diff er as to how far they are entitled to go in ex-
ercising this right, with the melancholy result that the various individual
rights of survival will clash with one another.
Hobbes was, however, able to off er a means of escape from this living hell.
Th is was by harnessing the one and only fundamental duty of natural law:
the obligation to adhere to contracts that are freely entered into. Pacta sunt
servanda was the standard Latin formulation of this principle: “Pacts must
be observed.” Th e state of nature may have provided nothing that could be
said to resemble an ordered human society, but it was within the power of
humans to create such a society for themselves, by means of contracts. Th e
way that this could come about, Hobbes posited, was for various individuals
to enter into a contract with one another, pursuant to which they would all
cede or transfer their natural- law right of self- rule to some third party—
who would thereby become the sovereign of a po liti cally ordered society.
Th is sovereign would then have the task of providing for the collective sur-
vival of the contractors by making use of the pool of rights that they had
conferred onto him.
Th e implications of Hobbes’s ideas for international law were many. One
of them— and the one that has attracted the most attention— is that the po-
liti cal sovereignty created by this pro cess was eff ectively absolute (or, at a
minimum, very nearly so). Th is was because the contracting parties have
given up the overwhelming share of their natural- law rights to the sovereign
in exchange for protection. But the present interest is in the implications of
Hobbes’s theory for international law. Th ese were two.
Th e fi rst was it now became possible to think, more clearly than before, of
a state as an entity that was quite distinct from its members— and, more
importantly, as an entity with rights, duties, and interests of its own, which
are diff erent from, and superior to, those of its members. “A city,” declared