Liberty and power are two subjects correlated along the history of the political modern philosophy. In the texts of Hobbes, the idea of liberty as absence of impediments to the actions helps us to think the duty of obedience to the sovereign power and the relations between politics and right. A situation of legal vacuum, in which everything is allowed, is, nevertheless, impossible, so that the solution of Hobbes consists in supporting the idea of the natural right like original individual right linked to the preservation of the life. His ideas of the natural right and of the natural law, which serve of basis to the duty of obedience to a sovereign, lean on legal, theological and biological principles. In spite of that, such principles do not surround the question of the extension of the sovereign power. Hobbes resorts to the analysis of the language. His contractual theory affirms the principle of preservation of the life on basis of the politics and supports the idea of the creation and of the maintenance of the sovereign power in the act of language implicated in the representative structure of the political covenant.
Hobbes; liberty; natural law; natural right; political philosophy; right; sovereign power