Catholic Encyclopedia on Hobbes (and Rousseau)

An excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Civil Authority. (for class use, condensed and partially reduced to outline form, with key concepts bolded)

Theories

There have been two great outbreaks against excess of royal prerogative; one in England, in the middle of the seventeenth century; another in France, at the end of the eighteenth. Each of these two periods was marked by the appearance of a great political writer, Thomas Hobbes in England, Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Hobbes was a philosopher, Rousseau a rhetorician. Whoever knows Hobbes well can have little to learn from Rousseau. Hobbes is rigidly logical; such inconsistencies as appear in him come from a certain timidity in speaking out, and a humility that approaches nigh to hypocrisy. Rousseau always speaks boldly, makes no pretence to orthodoxy, and frequently contradicts himself. His brilliant style won him the ear of Europe; he popularized Hobbes. To the philosopher, Rousseau is contemptible, but Hobbes is an antagonist worthy of any man's steel. The best that can be said of Rousseau in philosophy is that he drew out of Hobbes's principles conclusions which Hobbes was afraid to formulate...

Hobbes starts, and Rousseau after him, by contradicting Aristotle. 

• According to Aristotle, man is "by nature a State-making animal"; the individual man, if he is to thrive at all, develops into the family man, and the family man into the citizen; 
• and wherever there is a city, or a nation, there must be self-government, or, in other words, civil authority, whether vested in one or in many... 
• The State-making effort is "natural" to man; so is authority "natural", and, as such, of God, adds Thomas Aquinas. 

But Hobbes took "natural" in quite another sense. 

• That he held to be "natural" which man is, [prior to any effort] on his part to make himself better. 
• Further, his philosophy was tinged with the Calvinism of his day, and he took it that man is of himself "desperately wicked". 
• What was natural, then, was bad, bad on the whole. 
• Reason being an original endowment of man, Hobbes allowed reason to be natural. He allowed also, with Plato, that wickedness is irrational...[but cf. the argument of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, which bears strong similarities to Hobbes.]
• This allowing of wickedness to be against reason is a weak point in the logic of Hobbes. 
• But Hobbes would have it that reason is by nature utterly unable to contend with wickedness, 
• that it is overborne by, and made subservient to, passion, and so 
• is degraded into cunning, man becoming more wicked by his possession of reason. 
• Of himself, in his "state of nature", Hobbesian man is savage, solitary, sensual, and selfish. 
• When two human beings meet, the natural impulse of each is to lord it over the other. 
• By force, if he is strong, by stratagem, if he is weak, every man seeks to kill or enslave every other man that he meets.
• Man's life in this state of nature, says Hobbes, is "nasty, brutish, and short." So it would be, in an English fen, and in most other places. But Rousseau's imagination carried him to the Pacific Isles; he became enamoured of "the noble savage". He fell in with Hobbes's notion of the "natural", as being what man is and has antecedently to all human effort. But the "citizen of Geneva", as he called himself, was curiously free from Calvinistic bias, and believed enthusiastically in the primitive, unmade,natural goodness of man. 
• In Hobbes's view, though not in Rousseau's, man had every reason for getting out of his "nasty" state of nature. 
• This was done by a pact, or convention, of every man with all the rest of mankind, 
• to give up solitude with its charms, its independence, and its liberty of preying upon neighbours, and
•  to live in society, the social body thus formed having all the rights of the individuals contributing to form it. 
• This compact of man with man to quit solitude and live in society, to abandon nature and submit to convention, was called by Rousseau, "The Social Contract". 
• The body formed by it, commonly called the State, Hobbes termed "The Leviathan", upon the text of Job 41:24, "there is no power upon earth that can be compared with him. . . ."

• To Hobbes and to Rousseau the State is omnipotent, containing in its one self absolutely all the rights of the citizens who compose it. 
• The wielder of this tremendous power is the General Will, measured against which the will of the individual citizen is not only powerless, but absolutely non-existent. 
• The individual gave up his will when he made the Social Contract. 
• "No rights against the State", is a fundamental principle with Hobbes and Rousseau. 
• To live in the State at all means compliance with every decree of the General Will. 
• But there is a difficulty in locating this General Will. 
• Hobbes...seeing that tyranny is better wielded by one man than by a multitude, contemplates the multitude 
• resigning all their power into the hands of a Single Person, and 
• denying themselves the right of meeting without his calling them together;
•  so that, by the simple expedient of never calling them together, the Single Person may incapacitate the people from ever resuming the power which is only theirs when they are all assembled. 
• The General Will in that case is the will of the Single Person. 
• Hobbes's location of the General Will is not lacking in clearness. 
• But Rousseau would have the sovereign authority to be the inalienable right of the multitude — hence called the "Sovereign People"... 
• The doctrines of Rousseau have not escaped the censure of the Church. Rousseau may be recognized in the following propositions, condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX:
•  "The State is the source and origin of all rights, and its rights are unlimited" (n. 39);
•  "Authority is nothing else than numbers, and a sum of material forces" (n. 60): 
• "It is allowable to refuse obedience to lawful princes, and even to rebel against them" (n. 63).