>Hobbes problem is that he was scared
>shitless of power all his life.
Indeed. Hobbes himself admitted that he was a big-time chicken! In November 1640, when the Long Parliament began to show signs of activity threatening civil war, Hobbes was "the first of all that fled" to France; he describes himself as a "man of feminine courage." He remained in France for the next eleven years. This gendering of courage may be of interest, though we never seem to get a gender thread off the ground.
>Having given up his freedom to the sovereign his [Hobbes's]
>ethical egoism basically goes out the window except for
>a few exceptions such as being condemned to death.
This conflict between individual freedoms & sovereignty is endemic to the Social Contract theories or perhaps all philosophical attempts to finesse the conflict. You see the same in Locke, Rousseau (perhaps the most famous illiberal democrat: "the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all....[E]ach man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody"), Kant, etc. Ethical egoism & organicism are dialectical twins. Here's Locke's version: "Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his consent....[When] any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority....For where the majority cannot conclude the rest, there they cannot act as one body, and consequently will be immediately dissolved again. Whosoever, therefore, out of a state of Nature unite into a community must be understood to give up all the power necessary to the ends for which they unite into society to the majority...". Then Locke gets into a conundrum of how to define "consent": "how far any one shall be looked on to have consented, and thereby submitted to any government, where he has made no expressions of it at all." Locke defines that any man who has possessed or enjoyed any part of the dominions of any government (even "barely travelling freely on the highway") should be considered to have given "tacit" consent to the government. By introducing the notion of "tacit" (as opposed to "express") consent, Locke ends up preparing the ground for a Humean rebuttal: "consent" (and "freedom" of an abstract individual implied in it) is merely a political fiction. Why obey any law? Hume simply says, "because society could not otherwise subsist": "The general interests or necessities of society are sufficient to establish both [obligations to allegiance and fidelity]." Social contract theorists, Hume thinks, are merely producing an embarrassing sophistry, obscuring the central point.
Kant's notion of the original contract as an "idea of reason" tries to preserve the fiction of individual free choice, but he can do so only (a) by making freedom noumenal (= autonomy of practical reason from phenomenal causality) and (b) making the primacy of the state of law absolute ("the power of the state to put the law into effect is also _irresistible_, and no rightfully established commonwealth can exist without a force of this kind to suppress all internal resistance"). Thus freedom is, in effect, philosophically transferred from individuals to laws, and the state of right becomes the embodiment of reason. This strain of thinking is then developed by Hegel, most clearly in his _Philosophy of Right_. Unlike Kant, Hegel, however, thinks that contract is not a fit metaphor for the state, for the contract metaphor arises from "thinking superficially of a mere unity of different wills" (here Hegel follows Rousseau who made a distinction between "a will of all" and "the general will," and as you recall, it is the latter that is the foundation of Rousseau's indivisible & inalienable sovereignty). For Hegel, the "rational end of man is life in the state" (here Hegel follows Aristotle as well as Kant, while dispensing with arbitrariness inherent in the notion of contract).
Given the above, Hobbes, in my opinion, is less absolutist than many of his fellow Western philosophers on the questions of sovereignty. Hobbes's contemporaries were aware of this, and he was subjected to vitriolic attacks by many, including those in the Royalist camp, for his materialism, atheism, notion of contract, etc. (see, for instance, _Leviathan: Contemporary Responses to the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes_, ed. G.A. Rogers, Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1995).
Yoshie