Sovereignty, War, Nature

On what basis is political order founded? What makes the state, as the order conceived to produce and manage political relations, legitimate? These questions lie at the heart of modern political thought. Hobbes's notions of the social contract and the state of nature can be regarded as inventions in response to these questions. Hobbes's concern with political order and legitimacy arises in the context of political, religious and scientific revolutions, which uproot and call into question the understood natural order(ing) of God/the state/man in the world (and beyond). As Connolly (1988: 2) describes it:

In modernity, the insistence upon taking charge of the world comes into its own. Nature becomes a set of laws susceptible to human knowledge, a deposit of resources for potential use or a set of vistas for aesthetic appreciation. ... Human and non-human nature become material to work on. The world loses its earlier property as a text upon which the will of God is inscribed and through which humans can come to a more profound understanding of their proper place in the order of things.

These transformations imply a partial move away from God as the basis of all authority and the ascendance of man and nature — understood as 'material to work on'— in its place. Hobbes's thought expresses the effort to found political authority on the basis of the nature of man rather than through God. These interrelated phenomena — the problem of the foundation of political order and authority; and the centrality and equality of man/men within this order(ing) — mark the birth of political modernity.

This twin concern distinguishes Hobbes from Aristotle, who had little concern for the legitimate foundations of political order; in his thought the existence and legitimacy of political order are given. Man is by nature a social and political animal and hence the state constitutes a natural order. In The Politics Aristotle's interest is to explain which form of government or constitution is best — i.e., the rule of which group would assure the best-ordered society. His political theory accordingly revolves around the problem of the relations among groups or factions that are unequal in nature rather than the equality of individual subjects. Nonetheless, Aristotle's thought is of considerable influence to Hobbes as well as to Kant and more contemporary conceptualisations of political life.

Hobbes's idea of a movement from a state of war to a peaceful political society is one of the most influential motifs shaping our modern political imagination. The twin notions of the social contract and the state of nature can be said to form the crux of the explanation of the foundations of political order proposed by Hobbes. Placed at the origin of political order(ing) — i.e., in the movement from state of nature to political society, and at the point where the subject confers his rights to the Sovereign who thereby gains legitimacy — the social contract solved the problem of foundation.

The engagement with the thought of Hobbes and Kant in relation to questions of foundation, order(ing) and legitimacy in this chapter will suggest that their accounts of political order are not "founded" on a contract but function on the basis of circularities. These circularities of time, consent and rationality establish a surface of ordering tha