Thomas Hobbes and Founding of New Idea of Citizenship

The understanding of the modern notion of citizenship is mostly based on the sociohistorical and partly legal approaches and the contribution of the philosophical approach is not as considerable as we think it deserves. We attempt in this article to take the Hobbesian roots of the modernist notion of citizenship into consideration from philosophical point of view. We think that Hobbes's political philosophy has the fundamental implications for the new notion of citizenship.These implications are so fundamental that we may speak about Thomas Hobbes as the founder of the modern idea of citizenship. It seems that there are two principles on which he grounded his status as the founder of the modern idea of citizenship:The first is the idea of "individual"; it is one of the most important rupture points that separate the new political philosophy from the pre-modern one and meanwhile the substantial backrest of the some new notions such as the modern citizenship. And the second is replacing the natural law by the natural right or subordinating the natural law to the natural right. This transfiguration led to the individual-based modern state. In this article, we will show that if we can suppose the idea of "the individual possessed unconditional right in the state of nature" as the foundation of the new approach to politics, then we can call Thomas Hobbes as the founder of modern citizenship because he was the original designer of this type of individuality from the political point of view.