Essay Database

Thomas Hobbes was the philosopher who supported the ideas of legal positivism that untangled morality from law. The divine right is a tool in which the government used to exercise power over the masses with an eternal threat of death. He wasn't really a believer in God, he believed in natural law but deviates from the idea by leading to ordinary conclusions. One of those ordinary conclusions he discusses in his book entitled The Leviathan …

…that reason, government must have laws or society and government will not be stable. People of society will still have the right to appeal those laws that are thought to be unjust and create a new government. Thomas Hobbes focused on legal positivism. For him, religion was a way for government to control citizens with fear of eternal punishment if laws were to be broken, which is a tactic used in the U.S. today.