ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment social contract theorists proposed differing political calculations for the formation of society and a governing sovereign. However, without exception, they identified that the resultant sovereign should possess the right to choose whether or not to use the death penalty as the ultimate penal sanction. Thomas Hobbes envisioned the possibility of the punishment when he stated, ‘a subject may be put to death by the command of the sovereign’ (Hobbes 1996, 141), John Locke reasoned that the political power of the sovereign encompassed ‘a right of making laws with penalties of death’ (Locke 1980, 8), Jean-Jacques Rousseau affirmed that ‘putting the guilty to death’ was a justifiable action of the sovereign (Rousseau 2004, 209), and Immanuel Kant went so far as to exclaim in his formulation of the lex talionis that ‘[a]ll murderers … must suffer the death penalty’ (Kant 1970, 157). It has been generally accepted that the punishment became an ‘essential aspect of sovereignty’ of the early modern state (Evans 1996, 893), and such political philosophy then placed the sovereign state and the death penalty within a symbiotic relationship.
