英语考卷

1 英文课程期末测试

英译汉

Montaigne（蒙田）sought refuge from the trials of his age in skepticism, distance, and resigned

dignity. His contemporary, the French lawer Jean Bodin（让·博丹）, looked instead to resolve the

disorders of the day by reestablishing the powers of the state on new and more secure foundations.

Like Montaigne, Bodin was particularly troubled by the upheavals caused by the religious wars in

France – he had even witnessed the frightful St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre（圣巴塞罗缪日大屠杀） of 1572 in Paris. But instead of shrugging his shoulders about the bloodshed, he resolved to offer

a political plan to make sure turbulence would cease. This he did in his monumental Six Books of the

Commonwealth (1576)（《国家论》）, the earliest fully developed statement of absolute governmental

sovereignty in Western political thought. According to Bodin, the state arises from the needs of

collections of families, but once constituted should brook no opposition, for maintaining order is its

paramount duty. For Bodin, sovereignty was “the most high, absolute, and perpetual power over all

subjects,” consisting principally in the power “to give laws to subjects withougt their consent.”

Although Bodin acknowledged the theoretical possibility of government by aristocracy or democracy,

he assumed that the nation-states of his day would be ruled by monarchs and instisted that such

monarchs could in no way be limited, either by legislative or judicial bodies, or even by laws made by

their predecessors or themselves. Bodin maintained that every subject must trust in the ruler’s “mere

and frank good will.” Even if the ruler proved a tyrant, Bodin insisted that the subject had no warrant

to resist, for any resistance would open the door “to a licentious anarchy which is worse than the

harshest tyranny in the world.”

Like Bodin, who was moved by the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day to formulate a doctrine of

political absolutism, Thomas Hobbes（托马斯·霍布斯）was moved by the turmoil of the English civil

war to do the same in his classic of political theory, Leviathan (1651)（《利维坦》）. Yet Hobbes differed

form Bodin in several respects. For one, whereas Bodin assumed that the absolute sovereign power

would be a royal monarchy, Hobbes made no such assumption. Any form of government capable of

protecing its subjects’ lives and property might serve as a sovereign (and hence all-powerful)

Leviathan. Then too, whereas Bodin defined his state as “the lawful government of families and hence

did not believe that the state could abridge private property rights because families could not exist

without property, Hobbes’s state existed to rule over atomistic individuals and thus was licensed to

trample over both liberty and propety if the governent’s own survival was at stake.

But the most fundamental difference between Bodin and Hobbes lay in the latter’s

uncompromisingly pessimistic view of human nature. Hobbes posited that the “state of nature” that

existed before civil government came into being was a condition of “war of all against all.” Since man

naturally behaves as “a wolf” towards other men, human life without government is necessarily

“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. To escape such consequences, people therefore surrendered

their liberties to a sovereign ruler in exchange for his agreement to keep the peace. Having granted

away their liberties, subjects have no right whatsoever to seek them back, and the sovereign could

therefore tyrannize as he likes – free to oppress his charges（受保护人） in any way other than to kill

them, an act that would negate the very purpose of his rule, which is to preserve his subjects’ lives.

注释：

1 蒙田，法国作家，提倡怀疑主义和宗教宽容。

2 圣巴塞罗繆日大屠杀，1572年8月巴黎天主教群众在天主教王室及贵族的领导下对聚集在巴黎的法国新教徒进行屠杀，之后类似的屠杀蔓延到外省。保守估计在巴黎造成超过2000人死亡，在外省死亡人数达10000人以上。

3 利维坦，传说中的海中巨兽，力量强大，无可匹敌。英国政治学家霍布斯以此比喻人类为保护自己的生命所创造的政府。