8. What is the most important idea from the Enlightenment that you feel has had a major impact on the politics and nations of the modern world. You will need

to define the idea, provide reasoning for your choice, and discuss its impact on the modern world. You may choose from the following choices: Natural

Rights, Social Contract, Separation Powers, Separation of Church and Government.

The idea of Natural Right

Explanation:

Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a "war of all against all." In such a state, people fear death and lack both the things necessary to commodious living and the hope of being able to toil to obtain them. So, in order to avoid it, people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population beneath a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede some rights for the sake of protection. Any power exercised by this authority cannot be resisted because the protector's sovereign power derives from individuals' surrendering their own sovereign power for protection. The individuals are thereby the authors of all decisions made by the sovereign. There is no doctrine of separation of powers in Hobbes's discussion. According to Hobbes, the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial, and ecclesiastical powers.

Hobbes also included a discussion of natural rights in his moral and political philosophy. His' conception of natural rights extended from his conception of man in a "state of nature." He argued that the essential natural (human) right was "to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life ( ...)." Hobbes sharply distinguished this natural "liberty" from natural "laws." In his natural state, man's life consisted entirely of liberties and not at all of laws, which leads to the world of chaos created by unlimited rights. Consequently, if humans wish to live peacefully, they must give up most of their natural rights and create moral obligations in order to establish political and civil society.

Hobbes objected to the attempt to derive rights from " natural law," arguing that law ("lex") and right ("jus") though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the absence of obligations. Since by our (human) nature, we seek to maximize our well being, rights are prior to law, natural or institutional, and people will not follow the laws of nature without first being subjected to a sovereign power, without which all ideas of right and wrong are meaningless. This marked an important departure from medieval natural law theories which gave precedence to obligations over rights.

The impact of the natural right on the modern world is we humans most times barely hid to the laws governing the society because we are lead by our rights thereby not be subjects to the sovereign power which can affect the world negatively.