Mr. Kohlhaas has been charged with a number of serious crimes, and he is here to answer those charges. Mr. Kohlhaas did not rise one morning and decide to commit a few crimes. He did not in fact start out as a criminal in any way but as an aggrieved citizen who was treated shabbily by his own government and its legal system. He is here again defending himself in that same legal system, yet it is a system that has failed him numerous times and that itself should be charged with a crime for doing so. Indeed, we can look to the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes for an explanation if not a full justification for Mr. Kohlhaas's actions. Mr. Kohlhaas may have acted rashly, but he did have good reason and should not be tried by a government that has already failed its citizens and so shown itself to be illegitimate. Mr. Kohlhaas is here because of an appeal from the church, from Martin Luther, and not from a government he no longer recognizes as having any claim on his loyalty.
Why do we owe allegiance to our government in the first place? The reason given by Hobbes, following certain other theorists with a similar view, is the social contract, the agreement between the people and their government by which the government protects and promotes the interests of the people, receiving loyalty and support from the people in return. The kind of conflict we have seen in the past between the government and Mr. Kohlhaas show precisely the sort of thing the government is supposed to protect us from, not only from threats by our neighbors but from threats by the government itself.
The social contract is the agreement that took humanity out of the state of nature and into a civilized state. What would we be like if we were still in that state of nature? For Hobbes, the natural state sees men in conflict with one another as a natural course of events. People are created with different abilities both physical and mental, and thoug...