Hobbes And The Law Of Nature

Download or read book Hobbes and the Law of Nature written by Perez Zagorin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-06 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zagorin clears up numerous misconceptions about Hobbes and his relation to earlier natural law thinkers, in particular Hugo Grotius, and he reasserts the often overlooked role of the Hobbesian law of nature as a moral standard from which even sovereign power is not immune. Because Hobbes is commonly thought to be primarily a theorist of sovereignty, political absolutism, and unitary state power, the significance of his moral philosophy is often underestimated and widely assumed to depend entirely on individual self-interest. Zagorin reveals Hobbes's originality as a moral philosopher and his importance as a thinker who subverted and transformed the idea of natural law."--Pub. desc.