The republican idea of liberty, laws and the state

Bibliogr. s. 26-27

The republican idea of liberty/freedom, law and state is based on criticism towards some aspects of Thomas Hobbes' doctrine. Is "leviathan" really located outside the sphere of each individual particular interests? Is it really based on every unit’s basic rights, that refer to the universal and rational laws and that had been transferred to the state? Republicans prefer to emphasize the relation between individual liberty of every unit with both liberty and freedom of political community. in their opinion this is the proper answer to the problematic concept of liberty and freedom of political community in Hobbes' thinking. also, this is a direct return to Niccolo Machiavelli's idea of "common republic". Here the individual liberty and freedom are guaranteed by the existence of political community, based on the ability of every unit to identify the matter of every persons rights. all collective institutions can remain free as long as they are driven only by their own will. recognizing political freedom and liberty of both the community and every unit as complementary suggests to locate the basis for all the rights in this union. this concept has numerous consequences for the theory of the government, because if the state is to remain truly free, then all of its laws must be drawn on the basis of common agreement. the question is how to include large numbers of citizens in legislative bodies? Does the idea of wide participation bring some major threats? Those problems are only the beginning of a more complex discussion about the foundations of political community, the status of every unit in legislative process, as well as every person's attitude toward the law in general. in case of contemporary democracy it seems really problematic to pursue individual forms of politics. this results in a constant need of finding the foundations for supporting individual rights in over-individual bodies. basic political rights can only be guaranteed in the conditions of wide public inclusion.