This paper brings to light an unexplored aspect of Hobbes’s argument that political authority rests upon subjects’ consent. Consent enacts a transfer of subjects’ right of nature to the sovereign, yet she already possesses a natural right to everything. What moral difference, then, does this make to her possession of power, and how? In my reading, the difference lies in the rise of new obligations befalling the sovereign by means of an indirect mechanism: That many individuals, hoping for safety, transfer their right of nature to the sovereign triggers an obligation for her to accept the role of a ruler and perform the duties attached to it, for the sake of the peace enjoined by the laws of nature. This reading should also confirm the possibility of a consensual foundation for the Hobbesian right to punish and shed new light on Hobbes’s notion of tacit consent.
One of the reasons that elections have come to be so widely valued across the globe lies in their perceived ability to increase citizens' consent to be governed by their representatives. Yet, inversely, one may ask what election results tell us about citizens' consent. For instance, to what extent can election winners be assumed to enjoy citizens' consent? Does voting automatically imply consent to the outcome of the election? What does abstention mean? This paper addresses the question of what election results reveal about citizens' consent, from an empirically informed normative perspective. The question is of political importance, because the connection between voting and consenting is often exploited for political gain, and because representative institutions are now being increasingly questioned by citizens themselves. I plead for caution in any endeavor to interpret election results in terms of consent, and I argue that it would be wrong to assume, by default, that voters intend their vote to express consent. Rather, voters' motives can only be ascertained by asking voters about them, and cannot be deduced from their sole act of voting. In addition, much variation is to be expected regarding what is being consented to, and to what degree.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.