has been created by contractual appointment, is no longer able to establish: its dominion is nothing more than its commands, including legal rules. To be sure, its dominion is “absolute” or “unlimited,” because “Sovereign Power … is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it.”35 This is precisely because the human beings whom it rules have made it, however; because it is the expression of a “skill,” which “consisteth in certain Rules, as doth Arithmetique and Geometry; not (as Tennis-play) on Practise onely.”36 Using this skill, human beings have made the sovereign itself, and because they have made it, because they are its “authors,” anything the sovereign does by virtue of its authority cannot be an injustice against them, and is therefore always justified. A sovereign only appears external to its subjects, merely establishing and coercing, if they forget its basis, and therefore if they forget themselves, their act of establishing it. The sovereign’s power over its subjects, exercised in establishing and administering law, is unlimited: the sovereign may do what it likes, precisely because its authority is not its own (just as the sovereign is not its own author, so too its authority is conferred on it).
The sovereign, however, may only do what it likes in conformity with the goal or “end” that it is there to accomplish: “the Peace and Defence of them all.” “The end of Obedience [C.M. – and thus of sovereignty] is Protection.”37 This goal of the state does not grant the individual any right against the state: the fact that the state’s goal is individual self-preservation defines the form, and not the content, of its sovereignty. For only the sovereign’s decision can determine the meaning of “protection” and “self-preservation,” and therefore determine how one is to safeguard self-preservation. (And this, too, again follows from the state’s goal: we cannot ensure the protection of each person if everyone wants to define what protection means for themselves.38) In making such a decision, the sovereign is wisely oriented to familiar anthropological facts such as “natural timorousnesse” and exercising “discretion.”39 The exercise of sovereign rights has not merely pragmatic but also logical conceptual limits – and therefore limits that follow from the formal definition of sovereignty, due to its purpose: protection. There are limits to what the sovereign may do because, according to the concept of sovereignty, there are some things the sovereign cannot do.
This includes all actions in which a human being is opposed to himself:
If the Soveraign command a man (though justly condemned,) to kill, wound, or mayme himselfe; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, ayre, medicine, or any other thing, without which he cannot live; yet hath that man the Liberty to disobey.
If a man be interrogated by the Sovereign, or his Authority, concerning a crime done by himselfe, he is not bound (without assurance of Pardon) to confesse it; because no man (as I have shewn in the same Chapter) can be obliged by Covenant to accuse himselfe.
Again, the Consent of a Subject to Soveraign Power, is contained in these words, I Authorise, or take upon me, all his actions; in which there is no restriction at all, of his own former naturall Liberty: For by allowing him to kill me, I am not bound to kill my selfe when he commands me. ’Tis one thing to say, Kill me, or my fellow, if you please; another thing to say, I will kill my selfe, or my fellow. It followeth therefore, that No man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man.40
The variety of different cases that Hobbes enumerates (actions that the sovereign cannot require of us) share one basic feature: the sovereign cannot require a subject to perform an action that assumes or expresses an intention opposed to that subject’s own striving for self-preservation. The sovereign may not prohibit its subjects from striving for their self-preservation. For if the sovereign were to do so, it would thereby demand that its subjects violate the first law [Gesetz] of nature, according to which “a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same.”41 The fact that the sovereign cannot forbid the striving for self-preservation therefore does not imply that it is unable to forbid such a thing (for instance, because, in contrast to the Greek model, it has lost the power to educate). Instead, the implication is that the sovereign cannot wish to do so: this is not a question of efficacy, but of the sovereign’s essence, and thus of its existence (which is owed precisely to the laws of nature). The sovereign cannot forbid its subjects from striving to preserve themselves without self-contradiction. This is why it would not be unjust for his subjects to refuse such a command – although determining what is just and unjust is up to the sovereign alone.
This insight into the structure of sovereignty has two implications for law [Recht], the most important medium of authority [Herrschaft]. First, law is defined negatively, as a being-free-to or a being-permitted-to: law can never forbid subjects from striving for their self-preservation, which it must always allow or accept. This is the other side of the positive authorization of the natural by the modern character of rights, which we have already examined (see chapter 2). The internalization of the natural in law, the opening of law to the natural, is here understood to mean that the natural power of self-preservation forms the goal of law: law is intended to enable the interest of subjects, to enable their striving for self-preservation. This obviously includes the power to define and restrict their interest (so that everyone has equal opportunity). At the same time, however, it should now be evident that legal power has its fundamental limit, its unreachable counterpart, in the interest or striving for self-preservation: it must assume that this striving is a fact and allow it.
Second, this means that the legal system distinguishes between the striving for self-preservation – which is always allowed – and its fulfillment – which law [Recht] must always restrict. The sovereign may not demand that a human being violate his own law [Gesetz], the nature of his striving or volition – that he turn his will against himself or turn himself against his will “in such a way that he ceases to be a human being.”42 This means, however, nothing less than that the sovereign should not interfere at all in its subjects’ volition if it does not wish to end up contradicting itself, to end up contradicting why it was established and its justification. What the sovereign’s subjects wish and strive for, and how they do this, is their concern, since it is a natural matter – the kind of natural fact that constitutes the basis because it is the starting point for the creation of the sovereign. The natural, the striving for self-preservation, which the sovereign must authorize because he is authorized by it, therefore becomes internality, which systematically eludes his rule. The interior of the sovereign’s subjects is external to law and therefore law must remain external to it. Permission of the natural signifies law’s self-restriction in the face of internality and thereby its restriction of itself to exteriority.
Hobbes has very clearly formulated the distinction between a legally governable exterior and a legally ungovernable interior in religious matters (whose conception in the modern era results from this distinction). Just as only the sovereign can determine what is just or unjust (since there is no justice and no normativity prior to the contract that establishes it), so too only the sovereign can say “what is, or what is not the Word of God” in a “Christian Common-wealth.”
From whence may be concluded this first point, that they to whom God hath not spoken immediately, are to receive the positive commandments of God, from their Soveraign … And consequently in every Common-wealth, they who have no supernaturall Revelation to the contrary, ought to obey the laws of their own Soveraign, in the externall acts and profession of Religion. As for the inward thought, and beleef of men, which humane Governours can take no notice of, (for God onely knoweth the heart) they are not voluntary, nor the effect of the laws, but of the unrevealed will, and of the power of God; and consequently fall not under obligation.43
This line of thought clearly aims to distinguish the inner (thought or belief) from the outer (actions and declarations). The sovereign
