sanction the civil laws which must replace inevitably conflicting private
judgments with a common measure of what was ‘right or wrong,
profitable or unprofitable, virtuous or vicious’. A quarter of a century
later, in A Dialogue of the Common Laws of England, he sought to
demonstrate that in the English state neither the reason of individuals
nor Coke’s artificial reason of the courts in fact decided what was right
or wrong, but only ‘the Reason of him that hath the Sovereign Power’,
so that even judgments made on the basis of legal precedent stood only
insofar as the king allowed them.^4
Like Montaigne, Hobbes accepted and justified the power of the state
as the only antidote to the chaos created by representatives of the people
who claimed that ‘every private man is judge of good and evil actions’
and that ‘whatsoever a man does against his conscience is sin’. At the
risk of condemnation as an atheist, Hobbes spent half of Leviathan
proving that religion had nothing to say about how the commonwealth
should be ruled. Only the Old Testament kingdom of the Jews could be
called properly ‘the kingdom of God’, because He gave laws to it
directly through Moses. No superior authority existed which could
direct states in legislating for their own peoples—or restrain them in
their behaviour to each other: the jealousies and aggression between
different ‘kings and persons of sovereign authority’ was for Hobbes an
intractable case of a state of nature, and it was left to Grotius and
Pufendorf to attempt to lay the foundations of a law for an international
society of states.^5
Yet, if the state ceased for Hobbes to be an ideal of order and became
a calculation of the power needed to preserve a civil society in existence,
the metaphysical entity born in the middle ages as ‘the state of the
king and the kingdom’ was now indestructible. It was not funda-
mentally a concentration of power hardened in war with other powers,
but a country’s internal peace and order understood as a microcosm
of an ordered universe. Hegel believed that society was held together
by ‘the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses’, and
called the State ‘mind on earth’ and ‘the march of God in the world’,
though he too thought an actual state originated in ‘domination on
338 Conclusion: Law and the State in History
(^4) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), 5 (Intro-
duction), 161–2 (II. 24), 188 (II. 27), 211–14 (II. 29), 448 (IV. 46), 460–8 (Review and
Conclusion); De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, in The English Works of Thomas
Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, iv (London, 1840), 225 (II. 10. 8); ibid.414 (‘Con-
siderations upon the Reputation of T. Hobbes); A Dialogue between a Philosopher and
a Student of the Common Laws of England, ed. J. Cropsey (U. of Chicago P, 1971), 55 ff.; The
Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, 224–5, 227, 435.
(^5) Leviathan, 75, (I. 12), 83 (I. 13), 84–5 (I. 14), 104–5 (I. 16); 172–89 (II. 26), 232–41
(II. 31), 452–3 (IV. 47) 461, 466 (Review and Conclusion); Elements of Law, 170 (II. 6.2);
The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, 515–16, 538, 586.