The significance of Hobbes’s conception of power

Abstract

Hobbes held distinctive views about the role of power in organizing and directing human life and posing the central problems of politics. His English vocabulary (unlike his Latin vocabulary) conflates conceptions of force, instrumental capacity, right and entitlement in a single term. It remains controversial how far he changed his conception of human nature over the last four decades of his intellectual life from a more to a less egoistic version, and how far, if he did, any such change modified his recipe for pacifying human collective life. The best way of tracking the development of Hobbes’s political thinking is to trace the ways in which he saw the shifting contributions of power to human life in assisting, enabling or impeding human beings in living and acting as they wish.

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