Abstract

Hobbes's revolutionary and lasting contribution to the history of political thought, especially in De Cive, is his legal doctrine of the natural condition of mankind. His starting point is the liberty of man. In the state of nature, taken as a state of mankind not regulated by public law, it is precisely man's power to do what he would according to his own judgment which results in universal war. The only possibility mankind has to overcome this fatal situation is to create a civil state under common laws and public coercive power. The article gives, step by step, a painstaking account of, and commentary on the manifold juridical considerations Hobbes regarded as necesary before he finally came to deal with the constitution of a civil commonwealth. These considerations are particularly concerned with the "matter" the State as the "artificial man" is made of. Although the details of this part of Hobbes's teachings are usually more or less neglected in the literature, they nevertheless form, what one could indeed call, the foundation of the rational State of freedom