The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume 03 (of 11)
Thomas Hobbes · en
Private bodies regular, and lawful, are those that are constituted
without letters, or other written authority, saving the laws common to
all other subjects. And because they be united in one person
representative, they are held for regular; such as are all families, in
which the father, or master ordereth the whole family. For he obligeth
his children, and servants, as far as the law permitteth, though not
further, because none of them are bound to obedience in those actions,
which the law hath forbidden to be done. In all other actions, during
the time they are under domestic government, they are subject to their
fathers, and masters, as to their immediate sovereigns. For the father
and master, being before the institution of commonwealth, absolute
sovereigns in their own families, they lose afterward no more of their
authority, than the law of the commonwealth taketh from them.
[Sidenote: Private bodies regular, but unlawful.]
Private bodies regular, but unlawful, are those that unite themselves
into one person representative, without any public authority at all;
such as are the corporations of beggars, thieves and gipsies, the better
to order their trade of begging and stealing; and the corporations of
men, that by authority from any foreign person, unite themselves in
another’s dominion, for the easier propagation of doctrines, and for
making a party, against the power of the commonwealth.
[Sidenote: Systems irregular, such as are private leagues.]
Irregular systems, in their nature but leagues, or sometimes mere
concourse of people, without union to any particular design, not by
obligation of one to another, but proceeding only from a similitude of
wills and inclinations, become lawful, or unlawful, according to the
lawfulness, or unlawfulness of every particular man’s design therein:
and his design is to be understood by the occasion.