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Sam Bostaph said: 
 
<<I think it's worth bearing in mind in any comparison of Hobbes and Hume  
that Hume had more than practical reasons for not emphasizing a debt to  
Hobbes. They were opponents on the key political-philosophical point of  
natural rights.  For Hobbes, government was a way of "granting" rights and  
protecting naturally brutish humans from each other.  For Hume, rights  
predate government and government's job is to guarantee and protect them;  
and, human nature is not so brutish, as humans are God's creatures with a  
moral nature. 
  
Buchanan et al. have a Hobbsian view of human nature.  Jim Buchanan is 
quite forthcoming in that regard.>> 
 
I am not sure I agree with Sam Bostaph's interpretation.  Hobbes believed 
in  
natural rights---men and women have a natural right to do what is necessary 
to save their lives.  They trade off "absolute liberty" for something less  
because absolute liberty is hell (for a modern version see Buchanan's Logic 
of Leviathan).      I tried to make this clear in my earlier post.  I 
suppose 
the  
point I am trying to make is that Hobbes and Hume are much closer as 
"social  
scientists" than historians are willing to admit.  The ethical theorists 
who  
are miles away from Hobbes and Hume are Shaftesbury and the moral sense  
school.   
 
Indeed, any economist in sympathy with some of the modern Austrian school 
should admire Hobbes as much as Hume because Hobbes used (1) methodological 
individualism as his principal method of analysis (following Gallieo, etc.) 
and (2) pioneered the distinction between natural and artificial which Hume 
and later Hayek make so much of and (3) was an early subjectivist in his 
claim what what someone is "worth" is what someone is able and willing to 
pay for his services (this last influence shows up later in both Mandeville 
and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations ---chapter 5 I believe). 
 
To declare that Hobbes did not believe in natural law or natural rights is 
simply not correct.  I am away from my home library but I think my source 
on  
this matter is Warrender. 
 
Laurence S. Moss 
 
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