The Right to Punish

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan announced that the ‘question…by what door the Right, or Authority of Punishing…came in’ was one of ‘much importance’. In this he echoed Hugo Grotius who, while differing from Hobbes in the answer he provided, had written in 1625’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis [The Rights of War and Peace], that the ‘Origine and Nature’ of punishment had been ‘misunderstood…[giving] Occasion to Many Mistakes.’ This right to punish was seen by early modern political thinkers as needing justification. This was particularly true in the context of voluntarist models of legitimacy according to which individuals chose to become members of the political community and the right to enforce obedience wielded by the governors of these communities had its roots in the equal and natural rights of subjects themselves.