Present and contrast Hobbes and Nietzsche's account on the Essay

Present and contrast Hobbes and Nietzsche's account on the punishment - Essay Example that the society employees in treating those who have violated the societal norms and laws; for Nietzsche, the members of the society feel pleasure by subjecting criminals to punishment. A critical look at the Hobbes’ and Nietzsche’s accounts of punishment shows that the main difference in their views of punishment lies in the fact that Hobbes analysed the meaning and the importance of punishment from the social contract point of view, while Nietzsche analysed the importance and the role of punishment in society from the historical point of view. According to Thomas Hobbes, punishment is a mean that the society uses to enforce the social contract. For Hobbes, once the members of the society enters into a social contract or covenant, the members of the society agree to forgo some of their civil liberties for the sake of social order; according to Hobbes, the members of a society enters into a social contract and forgoes some of their social liberties for the greater good of all the members of the society. This is because the civil liberties that the members of the public forgo are vested in a sovereign who uses the power that he has been given by the people to protect other individual civil liberties, and hence ensure peace and order in the society. For Hobbes, therefore, Punishment is a tool that the members of the society, through the sovereign, uses to deal with those who violate the demands of social contract, so as to ensure peace and order in the society. According Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, the role of punishment in the society is to give pleasure to the members of the society through subjecting those who have violated societal norms and laws to punishment. In his analysis of the early procedures of punishment, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that, from the historical point of view, punishment was not meant to make the law breakers or the criminals experience pain and guilt, but it was meant to make those who were executing the punishment to