Leviathan
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Ans: According to Hobbes men are continually in competition for honor and dignity and because of this there arises envy and hatred. Men are plagued by “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death”. ÐFor Hobbes the solution lies not in the direct subjection to God but to a secular figure of mythical proportions. And so Hobbes speaks of the mortal God “to which we owe under the immortal God our peace and defense.
For Hobbes, this mortal god is sovereign and his actions cannot be questioned. He, like God, has absolute power, and therefore is out of the pale of justice, and therefore cannot act unjustly. This mortal god enforces laws of nature, such as justice, equality, modesty and mercy. Since all these run contrary to basic selfish passions the ruler must enforce these through terror. It is precisely here where the ruler works like God and so is in essence a god. The rule instills fear of punishment so that his subjects do not break the laws of nature. ÐFor Hobbes, no repentance would take place without an omnipotent authority capable of speaking to man through the language of fear. The ruler imitates God by creating order out of chaos. The complete sovereignty and absolute authority that the mortal God enjoys allows him to create a stable, political state.
The mortal god derives his power from the fact that all in the state have submitted to the ruler and in effect entered into a covenant that cannot be broken. This however, cannot hold true for every instance as shown in history, when many men have broken these Ðsacred covenants and deposed their ruler. The ruler is therefore, not a mortal god in its entirety because unlike God, who rules for all eternity, a rulers rule is ephemeral and subject in many cases to the opinions of individuals (modern day democracies). Their authority is therefore, never completely absolute.
Hobbes contends that the ruler is not only above the rule of law, he is sovereign, unlimited by Ðnatural, divine or customary laws. A ruler may very likely be like a mortal god in this sense. Dictatorships, and totalitarian regimes, in which various human rights abuses take place without any uproar, seem to in dictate that many individuals do tend to believe that their ruler is not governed by the rule of law and is consequently above them( the Holocaust). Even in democracies where all individuals are equal