Bishop Bossuet, Thomas Hobbes, Essay, Research Paper
English Civil War and Glorious Revolution followed the Dutch revolt
against Spain as the second of the Western Revolutions that ended absolute
monarchy and finally led to democratic representative government. As
tradition had it that the English leaders in 1641-49 and 1688-89 that their acts
were revolutionary. Parliament chopped of the head of one king and replaced
him by another because of the traditional liberties of England. Statesmen
and pamphleteers arguing for royalist, parliamentary, or radical principals
made this a impressionable period of modern political thought. The Three
main theorists of the time Bishop Bossuet, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke
had similarities and differences between their beliefs.
Bishop Bossuet was a tutor to Louis XIV s son in the 1670s, and the
most religious and the main theorist of the king s absolutism. He believed that
the royal power is absolute. That the king does not even need to give an
account of his day to anyone, and so it is not possible for writers to try to
write about the confusing subjects of absolute government and arbitrary
government. In addition, he believed that if the king does not have absolute
power he is not able to conduct a advantageous act for the state or put down
evil and rebellions. The king he believed is not a private person, but a public
one, which has the state and will of people with him. As all perfection and
all strength is united in God, so all the power of individuals is united in the
person of the prince . He found it magnifying that one man could manifest so
much control and power.
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher and political theorist and
one of the first modern Western thinkers to provide a non-religious
justification for the political state. Hobbes wrote the Leviathan which distilled
the political insights of the civil war. Hobbes saw in humanity a perpetual
and restless desire of power after power. He believed that without authority
to impose law by force that society would fall apart into a war of every man
against every man. In addition he believed that life without government was
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes from this contract theory
drew government conclusion opposite to those of the Huegnots and Cromwell
and his army, who had said that king is king by contract and had cut off
Cha
should obey the sovereign because the sovereign could maintain order. To
ensure the keeping of order he believed that the Sovereign s power had to be
absolute and unquestioned. Thus, Hobbes took contract theory and
transformed it into justification of free and elective power.
John Locke, was a friend of the Earl of Shaftesburg who had
founded the Whig Party, provided a theoretical foundation for what
Parliament had done and for the succeeding development of representative
government. He probably wrote most of his Civil Government: Two Treaties
when he was in political exile in Holland. In it he answered Thomas Hobbs
justification of absolute sovereignty with a convincing theory of limited
government. Locke s first principle was that all individuals have a natural
right to life, liberty, and property. Locke got the rest of his theories from
this premise of natural rights, and from a more hopeful human nature.
Locke also introduced a new way of government organization. He imposed a
separation of power that would let the elected representatives of the people to
check a tyrannical executive. He marked property as the basis of all freedom
and the purpose of government itself.
Bossuet, Hobbes, and Locke all argued that government was a contract
in which humanity exchanged the anarchy of the state of nature for the
security that government provided. Bossuet, believed in the absolute power of
the king and that all the king should be a public person having all the power
and strength of the people. Hobbes believed that the sovereign should have
absolute power, because he believed that society should agree to obey the
sovereign in order to maintain peace. Thus, they both believed that their
should be a figure that has power over the people. On the other hand, Locke
was more pessimistic than Hobbes, deriving his system from more pessimistic
views of human nature than Hobbes. Locke believed in natural rights allowing
to limit the power of the government, emphasized that property is the basis of
all freedom, and that a government that acted without consent, went against
the contract and gave the right to the subjects to revolution. Above all, he
believed that the citizens followed the rights of a region and in return the
government was a contract that provided them with security.
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