Relaciones entre la constante de hiperbolicidad y ciclos de grafos

The early theorists of the social contract differed on the precise scope of these natural rights, although all agreed that the right of self-defense or ‘‘self-preservation’’ was central. To explain the role they play in the theory, however, I will for the moment focus on Hobbes’s account. Hobbes claimed that individuals in a state of nature would recognize not only a right of self-defense but also a right to act on their own judgments about how best to defend themselves. But he argued that the shared recognition of this natural right guarantees that life in the state of nature will be appall- ingly insecure. As long as individuals retain it, everyone must feel vulnerable to predation at the hands of everyone else. For, in a Hobbesian state of nature, just as you have a right to judge me to be a potential threat and therefore to take preemptive action against me, so I am liable to form exactly the same judgment of, and have the right to take similar action against, you. The possession of these rights thus creates the self- fulfilling mutual suspicion and ‘‘war of all against all’’ mentioned earlier. In such a situation, individuals face ‘‘continual fear, and danger of violent death.’’

According to Hobbes, the nightmarish quality of the state of nature stems directly from the fact that individuals reserve the right to defend themselves as they choose. The naturally rational thing for individuals in this position to do is therefore to seek terms of peace, by signing some sort of collective treaty under which all lay down their rights to defend themselves as they choose, on condition that everyone else does the same. Hobbes argued, however, that in a state of nature individuals will be unable to assure themselves that others will follow through on such agreements even if they say that they are prepared to do so.

On his account, even if two individuals with guns pointed at each other are willing to agree in words to put their weapons down on condition that the other puts his down as well, in a state of nature neither party is likely to feel confident enough to put this verbal agreement to the test by actually putting his gun down first. In the absence of such trust, such agreements will never actually be put into effect. What is needed in situations like this is some independent enforcement mechanism capable of providing agents with a general assurance that others can be trusted to keep their word.

But Hobbes’s own argument implies that such a mechanism cannot itself be put in place through direct agreement, since any simple bilateral commitment would suffer from exactly the debility we have just described. In order to be able to trust other parties enough actually to enact any such agreement, there would already need to be some enforcement mechanism capable of forcing others to keep their promises. Hobbes concluded, therefore, that to set up such an enforcement mechanism some special, nonbilateral agreement is required. This special agreement is the social contract, and the state it brings into being becomes the guarantor of all subsequent mutual commitments among members of a society.

Hobbes argued that if it is to succeed in bringing the war of all against all to an end, the social contract can have only one possible form. This is an agreement in which all members of a society agree, jointly, to lay down their natural rights and instead to follow the judgment of a third party about how best to preserve themselves collectively. This third party agency is designated the ‘‘sovereign’’. In the simplest case, the sovereign will be a single individual giving rise to a monarchical regime. According to Hobbes, however, sovereignty may be also be aristocratic in form (if exercised by several individuals) or democratic (if exercised through procedures involving the participation of all citizens).

It is important to understand the precise structure of the resulting agreement. Hobbes’s contract is an understanding among members of a society that each accepts the judgment of a third party the sovereign as authoritative for all of them. All members abandon their right to decide for themselves how best to preserve themselves on condition that all submit to the sovereign’s decisions about the best means of their collective self-preservation. This is a nonbilateral undertaking because there is no reciprocity between the people and the sovereign. The sovereign does not surrender any natural rights in return for citizens’ abandoning theirs, or even on condition that they do so. The sovereign, rather, retains its natural rights but, as a result of the agreement, now exercises them, not simply in his or her own name, but in that of the whole community.

According to Hobbes, this is the correct way to understand the institution of the state and our relation to it. Whereas in a state of nature indi- viduals have the right to use force to preserve themselves as they see fit, a Hobbesian sovereign retains the (unlimited) right to use force in the

form of coercive sanctions, punishments, and other mechanisms of enforce- ment but now deploys it to coordinate the activities of its citizens in ways that it judges to be required for their security. On Hobbes’s view, the state’s right to determine rules of property, rights, and entitlements, to establish court systems to enforce these legal rights and entitlements, to identify and punish offenders, and indeed to perform all its traditional functions (national self-defense, health-and-safety regulations, the provision of important public goods, etc.), is simply an echo of the basic natural right to self-preservation individuals would otherwise retain in the state of nature.

It is important to stress that under the terms of the Hobbesian contract, this right is absolute. Once sovereignty is set up on these terms, citizens no longer possess any right to second-guess the judgments of the state about how force is to be used for the sake of collective self-defense. For Hobbes, acknowledging any such right would immediately return us to the state of nature and the war of all against all. A state claiming absolute and unlimited authority is, for him, the sole condition under which peace is possible.