SIX. Pardoning Revolution: The 1660 Act of Oblivion and Hobbes’s Recentering of Sovereignty

Abstract

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes turned the conception of sovereignty toward the generality of lawgiving rather than the singularity of judgment, a displacement that paved the path for the transfer of sovereignty from king to Parliament. Hobbes’s conception of equity and critique of the common law played an important role in this alteration. The Act of Oblivion passed by Parliament after the Restoration, which Hobbes himself analyzed in his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Lawes, provides a particularly striking example of how the change unfolded on a conceptual level; in this instance, something like the pardon, which represented the act of sovereignty most closely linked with the singularity of the monarch, was itself generalized and transferred to Parliament instead of being exercised exclusively by the king.