Power

Hobbes's Theory of Real Power
& Civil Order

The Foundationsof His PoliticalPhilosophy Reconsidered
A. DON SORENSEN
Indiana University
The final word in the interpretationof a great political thinker

seems never to be said. Part of the genius of a Plato (or a Hobbes)
appearsto lie in the Delphic quality of much of what they have
to say. ProfessorSorensen here attemptsa majorreconstructionof
the usual explanationsof why Hobbes arrivedat the political
philosophy with which we are all familiar.As Sorensensays,
however, this reconstructioncan only be sketched out within the
limits of a journalarticle,and we can thereforehope that our
readers'questions will be answeredin a later,fuller treatment.
A. Don Sorensen is Assistant Professor of Governmentat Indiana.
He receivedhis Ph.D. from Illinois and is interestedprimarilyin
political theory; his present researchis concernedwith political
stability and diffuse support.
This content downloaded from 134.129.120.3 on Sun, 27 Dec 2015 00:04:58 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
280
HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

THOMAS HOBBES LIVED DURING A PERIOD of
revolution and moral crisis,
when habits of common living were confused and men searched for,
and even fought over, first principles.It was an age of regicide and of
the theocratic rule of Oliver Cromwell. The Anglican Church, separated from Rome but not reformed,was confrontedwith the dissenting
Puritans and rebelling Scottish Presbyterianson the religious front.
The clash over basic principles of science and religion was being extended by such persons (to mention a few) as Galileo, Kepler,Harvey,
Descartes, Gassendi, Mersenne, and even Copernicus, though not in
body. Hobbes noted in the last paragraphof the Leviathan1that his decision to write the book was "occasionedby the disordersof the present
time."
Inspiredby the new science of his time, Hobbes wanted to lay bare
with scientific rigor and clarity the very "heart," "nerves," and
"joints"2of the body politic and to show how its parts must be interconnectedif civil orderis to be restored.He brought his ideas together
in a theory of "real"power which forms the basic structureof his general theory of politics as he presented it in the Leviathan. With the
qualified exception of some recent theorists, his theory of power is
probably the most sophisticatedand explicit one of its kind in the history of political philosophy. He anticipatedby several hundred years
a numberof the main ideas found in currentviews on the subject.
Yet despite the fundamental position "real" power occupies in
Hobbes's political philosophy, Hobbes's scholars have almost wholly
neglected or overlooked it. They have concerned themselves instead
with other narrowerfeatures of his work, such as the legal and moral
aspects of absolute authority,political obligation, and possessive individualism.3 In the pages that follow, therefore, Hobbes's theory of
power-the central framework for his philosophy of civil order-will
be analyzed and described.As a consequenceof this analysis, the logical foundationsof his politicalphilosophy as they appearin the Leviathan will be reconsideredand reinterpreted,as will a number of the
main distinguishingfeatures of that great work. Needless to say, a full
1 Leviathan,Michael Oakeshott edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1957).
2
Ibid., Hobbes's "Introduction."
3 See, for example, C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1962);
Richard Peters, Hobbes (Penguin Books, 1956); Leslie Stephen, Hobbes
(New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904); Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (London: The Clarenden Press, 1936); Howard Warrender,
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1957); and
J. W. H. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965).
A. DON SORENSEN
accountof his ideas cannot be given, nor can justice be done to many of
his insights, in a short article. Only the bare outlines of his political
theory can be examined.
I
Hobbes was preoccupiedintellectuallywith problemsof naturalphilosophy when he turnedhis thoughts to the disordersof his time. He put
aside these reflectionsto write the Leviathan,and in the last paragraph
of that work he announcedhis intentions to "returnto my interrupted
speculation of bodies natural."These speculations were later finished
and published under the title Elements of Philosophy.4I mention this
because Hobbes was greatly influencedin formulatinghis political philosophy, as it appears in the Leviathan,by his speculationsin natural
philosophy. Indeed, the logical structureof his theory of political society is based on his theory of causation,which is consideredin detail in
the Elements.If one is thoroughlyto understandHobbes's politicaltheory, therefore,his view of causationmust be understood.
Under the influenceof a mechanicalmetaphysics,Hobbes was a diehard determinist.He thought of the world as composedof bodies, much
as the physicist conceives it, which move and rest accordingto laws of
causation. Bodies in motion, he thought, constitute the one universal
fact. The universe is bodies in motion; it is a continuousprocess of one
system of motion evolving into another, a process of continual change.
The setting of a body into motion, or any change in its movement
whatsoever, is caused, in Hobbes's words, by some other "body contiguous and moved."5Politicalsociety, too, starts, stops and changes in
accordancewith the mechanicsof causation.
Behindevery event, then, occurs an "entirecause"-the aggregateof
all the conditions necessary for its production. This essentially is
Hobbes's view. But of particularsignificancefor his theory of political
power, as we shall see, is the crucialdistinction he makes between two
"partialcauses," the "efficientcause" and the "materialcause," which
together form the total cause.6Suppose two bodies come into contactone of them, active in producing motion, called "the agent" and the
other, undergoingthe action of the first, called "the patient." Now according to Hobbes, the resulting "effect" of this occurrence-the mo4"Elements of Philosophy," in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes,
edited by Sir William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1939), 8 Vols., Vol.
I. Unless otherwise stated, all italics are those of Hobbes.
Ibid., Ch. 9.
'
Ibid., p. 122.
281
282
tion brought about in the patient-will be determined, not by the

agent's activity alone, but by the combined,interactingcharacteristics
of both bodies. Here is how Hobbes put it:
The aggregate of accidents in the agent or agents, requisite for
the productionof the effect, the effect being produced,is called
the efficientcause thereof; and the aggregate of accidentsin the
patient, the effect being produced,is usually called the material
cause.7
It follows that since any particulareffect results from a relation between two partial causes, any change in the causal characteristicsof
either the agent or the patient will change the expected effect. For example, if there are two agents acting on a third body and one of them
ceases to do so, then immediatelythe behaviorof that body will change,
in directionor magnitude,in line with the remainingcausal forces. And
if, in Hobbes'swords, that same body has motion in its "internalparts"
and the remaining agent ceases to "press" upon it, it will "restore itself," that is, it will begin moving along a path dictatedby its own internalmotions.8It also follows, in view of a certainexpectedeffect, that
if either cause becomes "defective" as a causal factor, then the effect
will not come about. Note Hobbes's words on this last point, for reference will be made to them later.
And from hence it is manifest, that the effect we expect, though
the agents be not defective on their part, may nevertheless be
frustratedby a defect in the patient; and when the patient is sufficient,by a defect in the agents.9
In short, causation is strictly relational, and the characteristicsof any
object's movement-its direction,magnitude,and the like-will be the
resultant effect of all the forces, both efficientand material,that make
up the "entire cause" and will reflectany changes among those forces.
Space does not permit a full explicationof Hobbes's theory of causation. But enough has been explicitly stated or impliedto allow us to see
how that theory serves as a logical model for his theory of political
power and thus of civil society. By serving as a logical model I mean,
first, that the generalizations or laws in his theory of causation are
structurally similar to those in his theory of political power even
7Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 211, 344-45.
Ibid., p. 122.
A. DON SORENSEN
though their descriptive contents are different. And second, that the
structureof the latter theory is logically derived from that of the former. In different words, the theory of causation in his philosophy
properis isomorphicwith his theory of politicalpower in the Leviathan
and the structureof the latter is a specific applicationof the structure
of the former. It is as though the concepts in his theory of causation
were replaced by the descriptive concepts referring to the political
world without changing the form of the theory. Implied in all I have
said is the fact that Hobbes's theory of motion and causation is logically more fundamental than his theory of political power. It has
greater scope and range and thereforebroaderapplicabilitythan to the
political arena.10
But how in concreteterms does Hobbes connect the two theories?In
the Elementshe does it simply by equatingcausationand power by way
of definition, so that all he wrote about causation applies with equal
relevance to power. The only differencebetween the two concepts appears in the reference made to time-"cause respects the past, power
the future time."11That is, cause refers to effects that have alreadyoccurred,power to effects that can or will be producedin the future. Except for this difference, then, "the efficient cause" and "the material
cause" mean the same thing as "the power of the agent" and "the
power of the patient."Hobbes explains further:
Wherefore the power of the agent and patient together, which
may be called entire or plenary power, is the same thing with entire cause; for they both consist in the sum or aggregateof all the
accidents, as well in the agent as in the patient, which are requisite for the productionof the effect.12
Thus "real" power, as causation, is strictly relational. It is not a
propertyof either the agent or the patient alone. Both must be, insists
Hobbes, "joined together"for the anticipatedeffect to take place. It is
interesting to note, however, that as clear as Hobbes is about the rela10For a modem analysis of this form of logical connection between two
theories, see the paper written by a philosopher, May Brodbeck, entitled
"Models, Meaning, and Theories," in Symposium on Sociological Theory,
edited by Llewellyn Gross (Illinois: Row, Peterson, and Company, 1959).
See Hobbes's De Cive, Sterling P. Lamprechtedition (New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1949), Ch.
12,
No. i, for an example of the use he made of
his theory of causation in analyzing political phenomena about a decade before the Leviathan was published.
n Elements, Ch. io.
3 Ibid., p. 128.
283
284
tional natureof power, certaincommentatorshave criticizedhim on the

grounds that his view of power is not relational.Professor Carl Friedrich, for example,makes the point unequivocallyin several of his writings that Hobbes sees power as being "substantive"-as a thing or
possession like a bag of gold.13Others have followed his analysis uncritically,arguingthat it is much more fruitful theoreticallyto conceive
of power in relationalterms.14 Contraryto this interpretation,Hobbes
summarizeshis view in these words, the italics being his:
Thereforethese powers ... are but conditional,namely, the agent
has power, if it be applied to the patient; and the patient has
power, if it be applied to an agent; otherwise neither of them
have power, nor can the accidentswhich are in them severally,be

properly called powers; nor any action be said to be possible for
the power of the agent alone or of the patient alone.15
But it still remains to be shown how Hobbes's theory of power and
causation, related by definition in the Elements, serves as a logical
model for his theory of power and civil order in the Leviathan.This
may be done, first of all, by demonstratinghow Hobbes's definitionof
power in the Leviathancan be derived logically from a more general
definitiontaken from the Elements.As we know, he makes power synonymous with cause in the latter work except for the element of timecause respects the past, power, the future time. And he defines the
"efficientcause" as "the aggregateof accidents in the agent. .. requisite for the productionof some effect." Combiningthese two points we
have the following general definition:the power of an agent is the aggregate of accidentsin him requisitefor the productionof some future
effect.16Now, in the LeviathanHobbes defines power more specifically
as follows: "The power of a man, to take it universally, is his present
means, to obtain some future apparentgood."'7 (This definition, incidentally, is cited by Friedrichand others to indicate Hobbes's substantive use of the term.) By interposingthe parts of these two definitions,
See C. J. Friedrich,Constitutional Government and Politics (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1937), p. 13, and "Political Leadership and the Problem of the Charismatic Power," The Journal of Politics, XXIII (Feb., 1961),
PP. 3-4.
14 See, for example, Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Buratz, "Decisions and
Non-decisions: An Analytic Framework,"American Political Science Review, LVII (Sept., 1963), pp. 632-3.
5Elements,
p. 129.
6Ibid.,
pp. 122, 127-128.
7 Leviathan,p. 56.
18
A. DON SORENSEN
those from the Elements between those from the Leviathan,the relationship between them becomes clear: the power of a man (an agent) is
his present means (the aggregateof accidentsin him) to obtain (requisite for the production of) some future apparent good (some future
effect). As can be easily seen, the definitionof power in the Leviathan
is a specificderivationof the more generaldefinitionof the power of an
agent (the efficientcause) found in Hobbes's philosophy proper.
After providing a universal definition of human power, Hobbes
makes a simple distinctionbetween the naturaland instrumentalmeans
or resourcesof power a man may command.
Natural power is the eminence of the faculties of body, or mind:
as extraordinarystrength, form, prudence,arts, eloquence,liberality, nobility. Instrumentalare those powers, which acquiredby
these, or by fortune, are means and instrumentsto acquiremore:
as riches, reputation, friends, and the secret working of God,
which men call good luck.18
But the "presentmeans" of a man-his faculties of body or mind; his
riches or reputation-do not by themselves constitutepower as Hobbes
defines it. Hobbes said himself in the Elementsthat an agent is but a
partial cause. Those over whom power is exercised also are a partial
cause-the material cause. Somehow the natural and instrumental
means of human agents and certain characteristicsof human patients
must be joined together to make up an entire cause or to constitute real
power. Only then will the anticipatedeffects be brought about, the future goods be obtained.
But in what way does a man, or several men, act as a materialcause
in relations of power? Consider honor as one of several forms of
power.19To say that a man has honor, reasons Hobbes, means that he
is positively valued by others. It means that others have placed upon
him, to use Hobbes's term, a high "price.""And as in other things, so
in men, not the seller, but the buyer determinesthe price."20In different words, certainof a man's achievementsor abilities are transformed
by acts of evaluationon the part of others from mere characteristicsof
a person into attributesof honor and thereforeof power.
The implicationsare clear.The value of a man's prudence,eloquence,
riches or any other naturalor instrumentalresourcedepends on, to use
Hobbes's words, "the need and judgmentof another,"they are no more
18Ibid.
Ibid., p. 46.
20Ibid., pp. 56-57
285
286
than they are "esteemed by others."21Such characteristicscame into

being as "presentmeans" of power, as elements of an agent, as an efficient cause, in the minds of others.
Once he possesses the attributes of power, a man can use them to
draw out in others the dictates of his own will. But to do so he must
tap a need, appeal to a sentiment, evoke a fear, or in some other way
couple means and motives to make the cause complete,the power real.
There must be a joining of efficientand materialcauses. "Reputationof
power, is power,"observes Hobbes, "becauseit drawethwith it the adherence of those that need protection."It is power because there is a
meshing of means and needs. He writes further, by way of example,
that "good success is power,"for it makes men "eitherfear him, or rely
on him." In fact whatevermakes "a man beloved, or feared of many" is
power, because it is a "means"to have their "assistance,and service."
And if a man is "defective,"to use language from the Elements,in his
use of his resources,he will lose his power. For example,"richesjoined
with liberality, is power; because it procureth friends, and servants;
without liberality,not so; because in this case they defend not; but expose men to envy, as a prey."22
II
Hobbes's main concern, however, was with the forces of "common
power,"which hold a people together in a civil state of peace and security, not with the individual power of just any man. But as with the
power of individualmen, commonpower is a species of universal causation and must be understood as such. Civil society appears in
Hobbes's general political theory as the proper arrangementof partial
causes in a way that results in public order.
It may be rememberedthat, accordingto Hobbes's theory of causation, if a body has motion in its "internalparts" and an externalinfluence ceases to "press" upon it, then that body will "RESTORE itself,"
that is, it will begin moving along a path dictated by its own internal
motion.23Now Hobbes thought that individual men were driven by
internal motions in directionspotentially disruptive of political order.
He describes them in the Leviathan as constantly striving organisms
who can never reach a state of perpetualtranquility,who can never be
without desire or fear while alive, and who continuallyseek to preserve
21Ibid., p. 57.
22Ibid., pp. 56-57.
2
Elements, pp. 211, 344-45.
A. DON SORENSEN
or increase what is encompassedby their individual egos. There is an

inevitable tendency among any aggregationof such men, each ceaselessly striving to protect or expandhis own motion, for conflictto arise,
for bodies to collide. Only in the presence of common power do they
hold together in peace and security. When a common power ceases to
press upon them, they "no more receive their motion from it" and "degenerateinto a civil war."24To refer again to the terms of causationin
the Elements,in the absence of the forces of political power human patients "by reason of internal constitution . . . return everyone into its
own place."25 Or to use Hobbes's words in the Leviathan, in the ab-
sence of common power men deteriorateinto the "naturalcondition of

mankind,"a state of nature, in which there is war of all against all.26
Therefore,the centralproblemHobbes poses in the Leviathanis how
the lives of independentlymotivated men, egotistically motivated men,
can be systematicallyorderedto ensure peace and security. Put differently, how can the mechanicsof common power be set into motion or
kept in motion? By joining together the present means of sovereignty
and the needs and judgments of the citizenry-by combining certain
efficient and materialcauses-that is Hobbes's solution in its most abstractform.
Lookingmore closely at Hobbes's egocentricindividuals,one sees in
them not only disruptivepropensitiesbut a respectablenumber of desires and aversions availablefor holding them together as a body politic. Writes Hobbes:
Desire of ease, and sensual delight, disposeth men to obey a common power. . . . Fear of death, and wounds, disposeth to the
same.... Desire of knowledge, and arts of peace, inclineth men

to obey a commonpower.... Desire of praise, disposeth to laudable actions....
Desire of fame after death does the same.27
These desires and aversions, coupled with reason, comprisea reservoir

of needs from which a sovereign may draw by using his resources of
power or "presentmeans."As Hobbes said, they dispose or incline men
to obey a common power. The sovereign's resourcesconsist of various
means of rewardingand punishing-for example, of "rewardingwith
riches, or honour," of determining"what order of place, and dignity,
each man will hold," of "punishingwith corporalor pecuniarypunish24
Leviathan, pp. 83, 144.

2Elements, p. 211.
2Leviathan, p. 83, and Ch. 13.
Leviathan,pp. 64-5.
287
288
ment, or with ignominy"28-which are analogous, Hobbes reasons, to

the "nerves"in a natural body, "by which fastened to the seat of the
sovereignty every joint and memberis moved to perform his duty."29
When the sovereign's means are effectively joined with the subject's
needs, common power is complete or plenary. As Hobbes indicated in
the Elements, an "agent's" resources alone, without reference to the
"patient,"cannot "be properly called powers" nor can "any action be
said to be possible for the power of the agent alone."30
In civil society, therefore, counterdirectionalmotions are at work,
some pushing men toward a state of nature and others disposing them
toward a state of society. If men are to live in the latter state, then the
forces that "incline men to peace" must be made greater than those
which are "causes of quarrel";there must be a favorable balance of
motion on the side of civic order.The "presentmeans"of the sovereign
are necessary elements of the "efficientcause,"given the needs that incline men to peace, for ensuringthis favorablebalance.
But as Hobbes knew so well, the coming together of a sovereign's
means of rewardingand punishing and his subjects'thoughts and motives, in a way that ensures civil order,involves a very delicate and intricate process. After all, he thought, men are essentially equal, both in
body and mind, and this includes those who occupy seats of sovereignty. Indeed, the differencesbetween men are so small that no one
man can "claimto himself any benefit, to which anothermay not pretend as well as he." And natural equality, Hobbes makes clear, is one
of the causes of contention among men which pushes them toward a
state of nature.31Somehow, therefore, at least certain men, those who
fill the offices of sovereignty, must transcend natural equality to become the "artificialsoul," to use Hobbes's reverentwords, of the body
politic. They must become more than meremen: they must be endowed
with attributes of sovereign authority. This transformationcan only
come about, as in the case of honor cited above, in the hearts and minds
of the citizenry. And once it does, those occupying the seats of sovereignty can rely or draw on existing motives to maintain conditions of
public order.
By way of negative example, Hobbes notes that when this fundamental relation of public authority weakens or dies out, civil disorder
ensues. He wrote sympatheticallyin De Cive of the early Romans who
"reverenced[their sovereign] as a certain visible divinity" until sub28
Ibid., Ch. 18.
29
Ibid., p. 5.
30
Elements,
31
p. 129.
Leviathan, Ch. 13.
A. DON SORENSEN
versive doctrines were introduced among them by designing men.

These doctrines helped undermine the "divinity" of their sovereign,
reducinghim to a mere man and bringing "contention"and "slaughter"
into their common lives.32 Similarly, the abolishment of the Roman
Churchin parts of Europe,accompaniedin Franceand Holland by revolt of the people against their princes, also transpiredas the vital connections between means and needs broke down. On the one hand, there
exist in man motives which, writes Hobbes, "can never be abolished
out of humannature"-the desire to know the causes of things, anxiety
about the future, fear of death, and so on-and which dispose men to
worship God.33On the other hand, there were those who controlled
the ceremonies,sacraments,signs and other aspects of religious power
and who consequently could and did command obedience from their
subjects. But then the "failing of virtue in the pastors" and the introducing of new doctrines'"bythe Schoolmen"caused faith to fail in the
people, leaving religious leaders and, in the instances noted, political
rulers,naked of power despite their continuedpossession of the instruments and faculties of worship.34
To understand,Hobbes's thought, how that vital relationof common
power, that relation of sovereign authority, comes about or can be
brought about, one must examine the psychologicalmotions of individual men-how their thoughts and passions arise, how they function,
how they change, how they connect people as well as push them
apart.35Much of Hobbes's analysis of man's psychologicalnature cannot be consideredin this paper. But of particularimportanceis his theory of political language, public doctrines, and shared beliefs.
IlI
Hobbes was thoroughly impressed by the fundamental role language
plays in enabling man to create complex civilizations. Without the invention of language, he noted, there would be among men "neither
commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than
amongst lions, bears, and wolves."36Language enables man to store
experiences,to recall them, to reason, to share meanings, to communicate with other men.37It is a basic ingredient running through every
3
33
34
De Cive, LamprechtEdition, pp. 9-1o.

Leviathan,Ch. 12.
Ibid.
6Ibid., Chs. 1-8.

Ibid., p. 18.
"
Ibid., Ch. 4.
289
290
HOBBES S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER
aspect of man's organizedlife, a necessary conditionfor the occurrence

of every element of human civilization. As an extreme and dramatic
example of the fundamentalplace language has in man's social existence, note the story of the people of Babel. When God confused their
language the very basis of their mutual understandingand trust was
obliteratedand, observed Hobbes in passing, they were "forcedto disperse themselves."38
What Hobbes advocatedfor the subjectsof his Leviathan,then, was
a common political vocabulary, bearing known and settled meanings
and connected to the same experiencesor imaginations,by which the
basic relations of political society could be formulated,communicated,
and understood.Now in Hobbes's mind it is not simply common experiences and habits of speech alone which coordinatepolitically men's
individual strivings. It is the shared doctrinesexpressed through a political vocabularyand learnedby the subjectsthat help guide their reason and channel their passions along the paths of civil order. These
doctrines give substance to political language. Indeed, Hobbes's analysis of the psychic functions of language becomes particularlysignificant for his political theory as it illuminateshow shared beliefs assist
in establishing reason and common understandingand in focusing a
people's esteem on certain men or offices, transforming them into a
sovereignauthority.
Inasmuchas politicallanguage and doctrinesformedby it both unite
and divide men, as Hobbes knew too well, it follows that if civil order
is to prevail those elements of speech and belief which unite must be
discovered and taught the subjects, and those which divide must be
prevented from entering political society. In some way true beliefs expressed in a settled and known political grammarmust be imprintedon
the subjects' minds so as to provide a basis for their mutual understanding and to clothe certain of their number in the robes of sovereignty, making them more than mere men equal in body and mind to
other men.39If this could be brought about, then a crucial and necessary condition would be met for effectively combining the sovereign's
resources of power with the subjects' motives. That is, the partial
causes of political stability would be united as common power or
"plenarypower."
This Hobbes set out to do-to put forth a body of civil doctrines
which would help establish a sovereignpower and unite its subjectspolitically. True to his faith in the new science, he did not advocate the
revitalizationof ancientbeliefs, nor the invention of a noble myth, nor,
38Ibid., p. 18.
9 Ibid., pp. 80-82.
A. DON SORENSEN
least of all, the adoption of any current religious views to endow the
rulersof his time with badly needed authority.Ratherhe formulatedas
clearly as he could certain"rulesof reason"40based on the naked scientific truth about man, rules of reason which, if taught and believed,
would as a matter of fact help bind men together in peace and unity.
These laws of nature, as he also named them, followed (he thought)
from a clear apprehensionof the nature of man, his disruptivepropensities when living together with other men, and the causal conditions
that must obtain for civil orderto occur.
Hobbes set down in the Leviathana ratherlong list of natural laws
or rules of reason-nineteen basic ones in all from which many more
particularones could be derived. All cannot be consideredhere, but of
particularimportancefor his theory of common power are those making up the doctrine of the social contract.41According to this doctrine,
men should act "as if" they had conferredall their power and strength,
all their individual rights to govern themselves, upon one man or assembly of men, reducingthereby all their wills to one will. The sovereign, on whom these rights and powers are bestowed, should be construed as having in a moral-legal sense "absolute authority." The
subjects should think of him "as if" all their "strengthand means" are
embodied in him so that he can do whatever he thinks necessary for
their peace and security.42
Legally and morally, the social contractis the central doctrinein the
structureof law and governmentin Hobbes's great Leviathan.Fromit
flow the "rightof doing any act," or "authority,"43in the complexprocesses of ruling, from the making of general laws for the whole commonwealth to the distributionof local justice.
But, as Hobbes saw it, the doctrineof the contractmust be more than
legally or morally sound: it must be psychologicallygroundedas well.
He was not simply engaging in legal or moral philosophy for its own
sake when he spelled out the contract theory and other doctrines. He
was concernedwith the very psychological underpinningsof political
society itself. A viable public authority,he thought, is the most crucial
form of power for holding civil society together in a state of peace. He
also thought that it becomes a form of real or plenarypower as it comes
to life in the hearts and minds of the subjects.The legal meaningof the
compactmust be translatedinto psychologicalmeaningto provide common "imaginations"and "understandings"(connected to official "ele40Ibid.,
a
Ibid.,
Aa
Ibid.,
48Ibid.,
Chs. 14-15.
pp. 112, 136, 138-9, and Ch. 14.
pp. 112, 136, and Ch. 18.
pp. 105-106.
291
292
HOBBES'S
THEORY
OF POWER
AND
ORDER
ments of speech")44of basic political relationships,if public orderis to

prevail.
Hobbes insisted, therefore,that the subjectsmust be, in his own emphatic words, "diligently and truly taught" to believe the public doctrines "sincerely from the heart."45They must be effectively taught
that even their "designs and intentions" should be just and proper in
light of the true rules of politicalorder.46
Soundingnow much like a theorist of totalitarianism,he pointed out
three ways for accomplishingthe political indoctrinationof his "true"
rules of reason. First,the sovereign should determinethrough a system
of censorshipwhich opinions and doctrinesare conduciveto peace and
which are not, what men can be trusted to speak to the multitudes,and
who will examinethe doctrinesof all books before they are published.47
Second, he should see to it that the youth in the schools and universities be taught the public doctrines,for they become the opinion leaders
and men of knowledge from whom many other subjects learn what to
think and do. Finally, the sovereign should set aside special days, sabbaths of the great Leviathan, on which the subjects would be freed
from their ordinarylabor to receive instructionsin their public duties
and to be put in mind of that authority"that maketh them laws."48
In these ways, then, Hobbes would provide the citizenry of his famous commonwealthwith essential categories of thought and feeling
for defining, understanding, communicating, and carrying out their
civil obligationsand their sovereign'scommands.He would at the same
time precludecertainbeliefs, beliefs which bring "slaughter"and "contention" into public life, by not allowing those elements of speech and
doctrineout of which such thoughts are formed to exist in his political
society. His rules of reason, formulatedin terms of a settled and known
political vocabulary,would comprise the core meanings around which
public life could form. They would provide the central ingredients of
mind out of which common and steady expectationscould develop for
carryingout the everydaybusiness of living and survivingtogether.Believed sincerely from the heart, they would envelop a man or certain
men with authority that may even be construed as absolute, lifting
those men above a conditionof naturalequality.
An importantdistinction in Hobbes's theory of power, then, as the
"
Ibid., pp. 8-9, 13, 24, 31. Note also Chs. 5 and 8. Compare with Ch. 29
and De Cive, Ch. 12, No. I.

45Leviathan, pp. 220 and 224. See all of Ch. 30.
46Ibid., pp. 221-224, 32-33, 192-3.
47
Ibid., pp. 116-117.
8 Ch.
30 and p. 158.
A. DON SORENSEN
analysis so far shows, is between real power as cause and effect and
contractualpower or authority as a formal doctrine of right and duty.
Thus formal authority is defined as the "right of doing any act,"
whereas real power refers to the "aggregateof accidentsnecessary for
the productionof a future effect."Authority rests upon the doctrineof
the social contractwhich each generationof subjects will be diligently
taught, but power results from the "accidents"of the sovereign (the
efficientcause) and the "accidents"of the subjects (the materialcause)
being "joined together." Whether authority is limited or absolute depends on the nature of the conditions stipulated in the contract, and
Hobbes thought that it ought to be construedas absolute.The existence,
scope, and limits of real power, however, depend on means and motives
being effectively enmeshed and on the degree to which "defects"
weaken or dissolve those relationships. But of equal importance and
interest is the way Hobbes's notions of right and cause fit together: the
doctrines of authority become causal elements in the mechanics of
common power as they are "imprinted"49on the subjects' minds by
means of political education.
IV
Thus a viable public authority, securely anchoredin true doctrinesbelieved sincerely by the subjects, is in Hobbes's mind the most crucial
relation of common power. Unless the rulers and the ruled as efficient
and materialcauses of political order are joined together in this fundamental way, men will quickly degenerateinto a state of nature,leaving
behind the many benefits of civilized life.
But sharedbeliefs by themselves will not bind men together in peace
and security. Hobbes wrote with emphatic clarity that the "bonds of
words are too weak to bridle men's ambition, avarice, anger and other
passions without the fear of some coercive power."50Even when men
are effectively taught the true doctrines and believe them sincerely
from the heart, the preservationof civil orderrequiresthe use or threat
of "legal punishment"to secure the commonwealthagainst disruptive
tendencies which may cause men to go contrary to what they have
been taught and sincerely believe is right. Furthermore,Hobbes insisted that a sovereign'scoercivepower insures a sense of mutualtrust,
without which men are not obligated to keep promises and trusts, for
"he that performeth first, has no assurance the other will perform
9 Ibid., p. 221.
O Ibid., pp. 89-90, 94, 109.
293
294
after."No contractor covenant, even when acceptedsincerelyfrom the

heart, can bind men together "wherethere is a fear of not performance
on either part."51Even the "immortalGod," Hobbes mused, cannot
keep the motions of his subjects within the hedges of his law without
the use of severe sanctions in this life or the threat of them in the next.
This does not mean, however, that coercive power is more fundamental to a stable society than relations of authority created by common beliefs. For a sovereign's coercive power itself comes into being
only when the subjectsconceivehim to be their authorizedruler.Those
who occupy the seats of sovereignty have no such power as single individuals,as mere naturalmen. This fact becomes strikinglyclear when
it is pointed out that even though a sovereign may give, in Hobbes's
words, "life and motion to the whole body," he does so through a medium of official individuals who "resembleththe nerves and tendons
that move the several limbs of the body natural."52At least these crucial few (and in the long run most of his subjectsas well) must be willing in the last analysis to obey out of a sense of duty. For, Hobbes
wrote,
If men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to
obey the laws? An army, you will say. But what shall force the
army? Were not the trained bands an army? Were they not the
Janissaries,that not very long ago slew Osman in his own palace
at Constantinople?53
In short, coercive power may provide an important, an indispensable

impetus to civil obedience. But common beliefs sincerely believed define and legitimatethe way and help propel men along it by producing
in them a sense of political obligation and by conferringon certain of
their number sovereign authority. Without this men would not move
along the path of civil obediencefor very long.
Much has been written about Hobbes's view of absolute sovereign
authority. Certainlyit occupies an importantplace in his political philosophy. But only as a legal doctrineis sovereign authority absolute in
Hobbes's theory of power. For "real"power, plenary power, is always
for him a delicate and limited human relation, despite its doctrinal absoluteness. Indeed, the doctrine of absolute sovereignty itself as presented in the Leviathan aims at reducing and keeping the actual limitations of common power at a minimum. Hobbes argues unwaveringly
5 Ibid., pp. 89, 94.

52
Ibid., Ch. 23.

3"Behemoth,"English Works, Vol. VI, p.
237.
A. DON SORENSEN
against those who advocate views of limited public authority,warning

that such doctrines "weaken, or tend to the dissolution of a commonwealth."54
He wrote of power and causation,it will be recalled,that "it is manifest, that the effect we expect, though the agents be not defective on
their part, may nevertheless be frustrated by a defect in the patient;
and when the patient is sufficient;by a defect in the agents."55If, for
instance, a sovereign unwisely uses his means of reward to overcome
the "stubbornnessof one popular man" who aspires to greatness by
disturbing the peace of the country, there will "arise many more, by
the example, that do the same mischief, in hope of like benefit."56Or
if he "misuses"punishment, certain of his subjects may view his acts
as acts "of hostility; which when they think they have strength
enough, they will endeavourby acts of hostility, to avoid."57Or if the
punishment is not "great enough to deter men" from an action, it will
be "an invitement to it" because men, comparingthe benefits of their
disobediencewith the harm of their punishment,will "by necessity of
nature . . . choose that which appeareth best for themselves."58And
since power, "like to fame," increases "as it proceeds,"the sovereign
must watch carefully toward whom the esteem and affections of the
people are directed, for if misdirectedthey are "a dangerous thing to
sovereignpower."59
More examples could be reviewed, but the conclusions to be drawn
are clear: first, limitations on power or the loss of power may result
from defects in either the sovereign or subjects as partialcauses which
must be united to make power plenary; second, in order to avoid the
defects a sovereign must observe precautionswhich themselves constitute limitations; and third, sovereign authority must be construed as
absolute and be truly and diligently taught the subjects to ensure civil
order.
V
To conclude, the basic relations of Hobbes's theory of "real" power
have now been described and analyzed, thereby revealing the causal
structure of that theory within which central aspects of his political
Leviathan, Ch. 29.
" Elements, p. 122.
N
Ibid., p. 229.
6 Ibid., p. 220.
" Ibid., p. 192.
Ibid., Ch. 29.
295
296
thought fit together. The discussion has been brief and minimal.Many
important details of his view of political power and civil order were
barely touched upon or omitted altogether in order to keep the paper
within reasonablelimits. Only in a much longer work could the full implications of his theory of causation and power for his political theory
be satisfactorilyanalyzed.In presentingHobbes's views here, one main
purpose was to concentrateon importantbut neglected aspects of his
political thought, particularlyon the causal dimensions of his ideas on
language and opinion, civil education and indoctrination,and rules of
reason and sovereign authority.Hobbes was especially concernedwith
formulating in considerabledetail the legal and moral elements of a
sound political philosophy, for in the last analysis, he thought, these
are the kinds of elements in terms of which men direct their thoughts,
reason and communicate politically. These elements, diligently and
truly taught, form the fundamentalcausal connections, illuminatedby
a psychological theory of man's inner motions, in the mechanics of
civil order.
T H O M A S HOBBES A N D T H E
CONSTITUENT POWER OF THE
PEOPLE
MURRAY FORSYTH
Leicester University
Abstruct. The paper examines Hobbess doctrine of representation and argues that implicit in
this doctrine is the modern notion of the people as the constituent power of the state.
Attention is focused on the progressive evolution of Hobbess ideas about the multitude, the
people, and the constitution of political unity, and on the connection between his doctrine of
political representation and his concept of personality. The paper ends by assessing the
compatibility of Hobbess concept of the people as constituent power and his concept of the
commonwealth by acquisition.
T H Edoctrine of the people as the constituent power of the body politic is one
that is peculiarly associated with the American and French Revolutions. While
in America the idea developed unclearly, gradually, and sporadically during
the period from the Declaration of Independence to the making of the
Pennsylvania Constitution of 1790, in France it was outlined with some
precision at the very start of the revolutionary upheaval. The Abbe Sieyes could
thus claim, with understandable pride, that the discovery of the division
between the constituent power and the constituted powers was due to the
French.2 Since the revolutionary period the idea of the people as constituent
power has gradually become a reality throughout most of the Western world.
Both in the wording of modern constitutions, and in the modes in which they
are drafted and ratified, as well as in the provisions for their amendment, it is
almost inevitably acknowledged that the people as a collectivity of individuals
is the subject of the constitution, that all public powers emanate from them,
and that there is a distinction to be drawn between the people acting in their
constituent capacity and the people acting in and through the constituted
structure of government. In this paper I wish to argue that Hobbes, in
developing his theory of representation, and his theory of the commonwealth
R. R. Palmer, The Age qf the Democraric Revolution (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1969), p. 216. Palmer summarizes the process of development on p. 224. The formula, We the
peuplc ordain and establish, expressing the developed theory of the people as constituent power,
was used for the first time in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, whence it passed into the
preamble of the United States constitution of 1787 and the new Pennsylvania constitution of 1790,
after which it became common in the constitutions of the new states, and in new constitutions of
the old states.
Lafayette protested against Sieyess claim, invoking the American precedent. P. Bastid, Sieyes
et sa Pen& (Paris, Hachette, 1970), p. 391.
Political Studies, Vol. XXIX. No. 2 (191 203)
I92
THOMAS HOBBES A N D T H E CONSTITUENT POWER
by institution, worked his way through to the kernel of the idea of the people
as the constituent power of the body politic, and that herein lies the main
historical significance of his theory of representation and constitution.
Hobbess theory of representation has not of course been ignored in recent
years. Hanna Pitkin, in particular, has examined it on two occasions3 with
both thoroughness and insight. Pitkin, however, seems curiously uncertain
about the significance of the theory to which she devotes her attention. In her
first study she suggests that an examination of Hobbess concept of representation is largely a prophylactic enterprise. Hobbess analysis is both temptingly plausible and peculiarly wrong. In discovering why it is plausible and
yet wrong we may ourselves be freed from the same temptation and thus
protected against making the same error.4 In her second study she is more
reluctant to call Hobbess analysis wrong, but remains extremely tentative in
her judgement of its merits. She calls his concept partial, formal, and empty of
substance, and yet she also maintains that his definition is not just wrong,
not obviously wrong.6 It is perhaps in a sense both right and not right.
Hobbes, she concludes, developed too narrow a perspective on representation
by approaching it from only one angle, by taking into account only one kind
of representation.
Without entering into a full discussion of Pitkins analysis, it may be
suggested that her equivocation can in part be attributed to her own method
which, as she explains, is based largely on ordinary language philosophy.8
She is concerned with exploring representation by way of all the usages of the
term, and finds that not only does Hobbes not consider all the usages, but that
his own usage is not normal or ordinary. Hobbes thus becomes in her hands a
kind of unskilled linguistic analyst. Indeed at one point she goes further,
calling his theory of representation a verbal game which ignores actual
political problem^'.^ Hobbes is thus not only chided for doing language
philosophy badly, but for playing verbal games instead of tackling real
problems.
What is missing here is a direct confrontation with the central problem to
which Hobbes was addressing himself. Hobbes was primarily concerned not
with political questions in general, nor with representation in general, nor with
conforming to the ordinary usage of words. He was concerned first and
foremost with defining the essence of a commonwealth or state. Words were
tools to be used with the utmost care in carrying out this task, but they were
not themselves the primary matter to be investigated. As he said himself, the
use of words was to register to ourselves, and make manifest to others the
thoughts and conceptions of our minds.1 Hobbes used the word represen-
H. Pitkin, HobbessConcept of Representation, American Political Science Review, 58 (1964),

32840, 902-18, and The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, University of California Press,
1967), of which the second chapter is devoted to The Problem of Thomas Hobbes.
Pitkin, Hobbess Concept, p. 328.
Pitkin, Concepr of Representation. p. 34.
Pitkin, Concept of Representation, p. 36.
Pitkin, Concept of Representation. p. 6 ff.
l o Leviathan, ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford, Blackwell, 1960). p. 441.
MURRAY FORSYTH
I93
tation in Leviathan because in order to denote his conception of the essence of

the state he came to consider that this term was highly appropriate. It is thus
not enough to say that he did not make an exhaustive study of the usages of
the word representation, or indeed that he did not use the term in an ordinary
way. The real question is surely whether or not there does indeed lie, at the
root of the state or body politic, a process which may appropriately be called
representation. In arguing that Hobbess doctrine of representation expresses
the doctrine of the people as constituent power, a doctrine which has gradually
come to be accepted as indicating the root of the body politic, I wish to suggest
that representation as Hobbes defined it can be said to stand at the basis of
the state.
In order to draw out the positive significance of Hobbess theory of
representation it is necessary to begin with one of the most vigorous themes of
Hobbess two early works of political philosophy, the Elements of Law of 1640,
and the De Cive of 1642. This theme is the radical difference between a
multitude and the people, a difference which Hobbes considered was too
easily slurred over. The antithesis is perhaps best summed up in Hobbess
sentences: the people is not in being before the constitution of government as
not being any person, but a multitude of single persons. For Hobbes a
multitude was a multiplicity of persons who, while not necessarily having no
relations at all, were not a unity. The people by contrast was one person,
whether a single man or a single assembly, whose one will, as he wrote in the
Elements, included and involved the will of every one in particular. The
presence of a multitude thus excluded that of the people and vice versa.
It followed that the sovereign and the people were for Hobbes in his early
writings, one and the same. One person received a multiplicity of submissions
from the several persons of the multitude, and in receiving these submissions
became the people. The people existed nowhere outside the sovereign, and
there was no unity except him. Hobbes never emphasized the absolute identity
of people and sovereign more strongly than when he wrote: The people is
somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be
attributed; none of these can properly be said of a multitude. The people rules
in all governments. For even in monarchies the people commands; for the
people wills by the will of one man; but the multitude are citizens, that is to
say, subjects. In a democracy and aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude,
but the court is the people. And in a monarchy, the subjects are the multitude,
and (however it seems a paradox) the king is the people.I3 Here the phrase
LEtat, cesf moi! clearly applies in its most literal sense. The only significant
occasion on which Hobbes was constrained to qualify the rigorous antithesis
of multitude and people was when he came to discuss the duties of the
sovereign. Salus populi, the safety o f the people, he wrote here, was the
supreme law, but he immediately explained that by the people in this place we
understand, not one civil person, namely the city itself which governs, but the
Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society (hereafter cited by its original
Latin title De Cive), English Works, ed. Molesworth (London, J . Bohn, 183945), Vol. 11, p. 98.
I r ! The Elemenis of Law Natural and Politic. ed. F. Tonnies (second ed., Introd. M. M.
Goldsmith, London. Cass, 1969). p. 124.
1 3 De Cive, p . 158.
I 94
THOMAS HOBBES A N D THE CONSTITUENT POWER
multitude of subjects which are g~verned.~

The awkwardness of Hobbess
categorical differentiation is apparent.
Granted the mutual exclusivity of multitude and people how did the people
come into existence out of the multitude? In the case of the non-instituted or
natural city there was of course no problem. By natural power one or several
persons accumulated either seriatim or all at once the submissions of many
single persons. In accumulating these submissions the persons with natural
power became the people. But what of the constituted or instituted city? How
did one person become the people in this instance? For Hobbes this was, and
could only be, an almost magical spontaneous generation, like a creation out
of nothing by human wit.lS He could not permit the multitude to appoint or
designate one person to whom they would submit their wills, because this
would bestow upon the multitude an element of will and unity which his
radical antitheses between the one and the many or the people and a multitude
did not allow. The solution could only be that in the very act of willing the
creation of a city there was a city. Thus the act of willing by a multitude could
only mean that the opinion of the major part had been accepted by all. This
acceptance was itself the erection of a democratic body politic or city, one in
which the sovereign was the assembly of all the people deciding by majority
vote.I6 All constituted cities thus began with a democratic city. Aristocracy and
monarchy were created later when an already existing democratic city, for
reasons of convenience, transferred or passed its power and sovereignty (to use
the terminology of the Elements), or gave up its right and authority (to use the
terminology of De Cive) to one or a few men. In De Cive Hobbes even went
so far as to say that when the people, in the sense here of the sovereign of a
democratic polity in particular, conveyed its whole right to a monarch, it
dissolved back into a rude multitude. *
The language which Hobbes used to describe the process of constitution in
his early writings has undoubtedly a very strong echo in it of the language of
the ancient lex regia, the legal form whereby the Roman people was supposed
to have conferred all its power on the Emperor: Lege Regia de eius imperio
lata, populus ei et in eum omnem suam potestatem contulit.9 The lex regia was
indeed a precursor, or early foreshadowing, of the doctrine of the people as the
constituent power. It was only a foreshadowing however because, in its various
formulations, it suggested a commonwealth or republic surrendering its power
l 4 De Cive, p. 167. Hobbes was also constrained to qualify his rigorous distinction between a
multitude and the people when discussing Biblical texts concerned with the formation of
government which did not of course conform to his own usage (De Cive, p. 143). He significantly
relaxed the antithesis in a long footnote added to De Cive in the 1647 edition, endorsing the
interchangeability of the words multitude and people in certain instances as long as the underlying
distinction between one commanding will and many subject wills was kept clear (De Cive, p. 72 f.),
Elements, p. 108.
l 6 Elements, p. 118; De Cive. p. 96-9.
Elemenis, p. 121 ff.; De Cive, p. 99 ff. For a more detailed comparison of the two texts on this
issue see M. M. Goldsmiths Introduction to the Elements, pp. xvi-xviii. The present study
however differs from Goldsmiths subsequent evaluation (pp. xviiii-xx) of the change that takes
place between the Elements and De Cive on the one hand, and Leviathan on the other.
De Cive. p. 100.
This is Ulpians formulation of the lex regia in the wording that Bodin uses in the Six Bookes
of a Commonweale, ed. K . D. McRae (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1962). p. 733.
MURRAY FORSYTH
195
unreservedly to one man-originally the Roman Republic surrendering its

power to the Emperor-rather than a people willing the original constitution
of public powers. This too was the sense of Hobbess account, when he
described the people establishing aristocracy and monarchy. The people who
performed the task of constituting were for him already a constituted body
politic who gave up what they possessed.
Hence in Hobbess early works there was no gap or fissure between a
multitude, and the people ruling as sovereign, through which the people
neither as sovereign nor multitude, but as an original constituting will could
appear. In Leviathan, as will be seen, Hobbes did make room for such a
constituent will, by means of his doctrine of representation.
It should be added that the argument that the people and sovereign are
identical in Hobbess early works must be kept distinct from the question of
how far the individual wills of the multitude are identified with the will of the
sovereign in these works. There can be little doubt that in the Elements and De
Cive the equation of wills is not as close and positive as it is later in Leviathan.
Thus in the two earlier books individual wills are aligned to the will of the
sovereign by a process of surrender or giving up of personal rights, and above
all by the abandonment of the right of resistance-the renunciatory language
of the /ex regia again-rather than by the positive owning or authorization
that appears in the later text. Indeed it can be said that in Leviathan the closer
identification of the individual will and that of the sovereign by means of the
concept of authorization, and the greater differentiation between the sovereign
and the people by means of the concept of representation, go hand in hand.
In Leviarhan the radical differentiation between people and multitude
disappears. There is, it is true, a brief stricture, contained in the chapter Of the
Difference of Manners, on the difficulty men experience in distinguishing
between one action of many men, and many actions of one multitude, which
leads them to take for the action of the people, that which is a multitude of
actions done by a multitude of men, led perhaps by the persuasion of one.20
This brief observation however can hardly be called a prominent theme in the
work.L
In place of the antithesis between multitude and people there appears in
Leviathan an account of a multitude becoming one person through being
represented by one person. The words in which Hobbes first describes this
process, in the sixteenth chapter, entitled Of Persons, Authors, and Things
Personated, are of course crucial and must be quoted:
A multitude of men, are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person,
represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in
particular. For it is the unify of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that
maketh the person one. And it is the representer that beareth the person, and but one
person: and unity, cannot otherwise be understood in multitude.
And because the multitude naturally is not one, but many; they cannot be understood
for one; but many authors, of every thing their representative saith, or doth in their
Leviathan. p. 61.
I differ here from J . Chanteur who treats Hobbess discussion of the multitude and the people
as if it underwent no change. Note sur les Notions de Peuple et de Multitude chez Hohhes,
Hobbes Forschungen, ed. R. Koselleck and R. Schnur (Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 1967). p.
223-35.
lo
196
THOMAS HOBBES A N D THE CONSTITUENT P O W E R
name; every man giving their common representer, authority from himself in particular; and owning all the actions the representer doth, in case they give him
authority without stint: otherwise, when they limit him in what and how far he shall
represent them, none of them owneth more than they gave him commission to act.
The compressed sentences here are not easy to interpret. It is clear however
that the process of creating unity out of multiplicity has two sides to it. First,
there is the establishment of one person as a common representer for the
multitude, and secondly, there is the authorization of the acts and words of the
common representer. These may be called the two moments of Hobbess
concept of representation in Leviathan. They are logically connected : before
someones acts and words can be authorized that someone must be in
existence.
These two moments of representation correspond to the two moments
implicit in Hobbess concept of a person, which also comes to fruition in
L e ~ i a t h a n . ~From his earliest published philosophical writings onwards
Hobbes had been strongly hostile to the scholastic and Cartesian-rationalist
metaphysics of the soul or ego, which had sought to define it as an immaterial
substance, separate from mans practical activity in the world, with qualities
that explained this activity. Hobbes was particularly concerned to argue that
the will was not an abstract faculty behind human action but action (or nonaction) in itself.4 For all his objections to the scholastic and Cartesianrationalist approach, however, Hobbes did not deny that practical activity in
the world necessarily presupposed a single something that acted, a subject
distinct though not separate from its actions. His position is perhaps most
clearly expressed in his third objection to Descartess Meditations on First
Philosophy:
I myself [he wrote] who am conscious [cogito],am distinct from my consciousness; and
my consciousness is distinct, though not separated, from me, just a s . . . a leap is from
one who leaps. If M. Descartes means that the one who understands is identical with his
understanding, we shall fall back into the scholastic way of talking; the understanding
understands, the sight sees, the will wills; and by a perfectly fair analogy a walk (or at
any rate the power of walking) walks. All these expressions are obscure and
improper. . . 2 s
A single source of actions, or ego-something of which one can say little

except that it exists-was the first moment in Hobbess definition of a person.
It is expressed in those first few words of the sixteenth chapter of Leviathan: A
PERSON, is he, whose words and actions.. . 2 6 The second moment in
Leviathan, p. 107-8.
In both the Elements and De Cive Hobbes had defined the body politic as a person, but not
until Leviathan did he discuss the concept of personality itself in a separate chapter.
2 4 See, for example, Elements, pp. 62-3, and Leviathan, p. 38.
2 1 Objectiones ad Cartesii Meditationes, in Opera Latina, ed. Molesworth (London, J . Bohn,
1 8 3 9 4 9 , Vol. V, pp. 256-7. Hobbess objections were originally published with Descartess
Meditations in 1641. 1 have made use ot the English translation in Descartes: Philosophical
Writings, ed. E. Anscombe and P. T. Geach (London, Nelson, 1970), p. 132.
2 6 Leviathan, p. 105. I have omitted Hobbess italicization. In the Appendix to the Latin edition
of Leviathan, Hobbes wrote that the word person signified ?em quamcunque singularem agentem,
Opera Latina, Vol. 111, p. 533. In An Answer t o . . . Dr. Bramhall, person is said to signify an
intelligent substance, that acteth, English Works, Vol. IV, p. 310. In De Homine, persona est, cui
verba et actiones hominum attribuuntur . . .* Opera Latina, Vol. 11, p. 130.
12
MURRAY FORSYTH
197
Hobbess concept of a person was nothing other than the external manifestations (actions and words) of a single ego or source of actions. Hobbes thus
defined a person as an actor in two senses: as a single subject or source of
actions, and as a presenter of actions and words to others, like a stage actor.
An ego or soul whose external acts were considered its own was for Hobbes a
natural person, and an ego or soul whose external acts were considered as
anothers was an artificial person. The external acts of an artificial person were
sometimes owned or authorized by the other people concerned, and sometimes
not.=
It can be seen that the multitude became a unity, according to Hobbess
account in chapter sixteen of Leviathan, through being represented as a person
in both the basic senses that have been outlined. To become a person in the
sense of an ego or single subject of actions it had to be represented by an ego
or single subject of actions. In Hobbess words: For it is the unity of the
representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one. And
it is the representer that beareth the person, and but one person: and unity,
cannot otherwise be understood in multitude.
The most significant thing about these words is that it is not the acts and
words of the multitude that are being made present by the representer, nor the
multiple egos or souls of the individuals who compose it, but the multitudes
own oneness. The singleness of the representing person here manifests nothing
other than the singleness or ego of the multitude. By the same token a latent or
non-present oneness or ego, something that becomes present or manifest in
the singleness of the representer, is necessarily acknowledged or conceded to
exist in the multitude.28
To establish one person to make present the unity of the multitude is only
one side of the process by which a multitude transforms itself, however. The
acts of the common representer must be authorized. What is authorization in
this context? It is the owning of the acts of the common representer by each
individual, either completely or with limitations. It relates to the scope of the
representatives actions, not to their rootedness in one source. When a
common ego has been established and its acts have been authorized, the
multitude has become a unity.
It may seem that to speak of an ego or personality latent in the multitude is
to smuggle an illicit common essence into Hobbess particularist or atomistic
world. This, however, is to overlook the ambivalence that pervades Hobbess
actual account of the multitude in the state of nature. To be sure he repeatedly
stresses its atomistic and anarchic character, but he simultaneously gives many
indications that the individuals who compose it are engaged in reciprocal
arrangements with one another in accordance with the laws of nature, and
possess some sort of identity vis-h-vis a common enemy.19 Hobbess doctrine
Leviathan. pp. 1 0 5 4 . See also the discussion in the texts referred to in the previous footnote.
H. Pitkin interestingly gives a precise definition of representation in the sense outlined here
when she writes that it means the making present of something which is nevertheless not literally
present (The Concept of Representafion, p. 144). She does not however relate this definition to
Hobbess use of the term.
L P 1 have examined the ambivalent nature of Hobbess state of nature more fully in Thomas
Hobbes and the External Relations of States, British Journal of International Studies, 5 ( 1 9 7 9 ~
196-209.
L7
198
T H O M A S HOBBES A N D T H E C O N S T I T U E N T P O W E R
of representation, with its implication of a latent group p e r ~ o n a l i t y in~ ~the

multitude is thus not so completely at variance with his doctrine of the
multitude in the state of nature as might at first sight appear.
The compressed account of unification through representation which
Hobbes gives in chapter sixteen of Leviathan is in effect his first definition of
the essence of the state or commonwealth. It is followed by the much longer
and better known account of the generation of a commonwealth in chapter
seventeen. Here we find a process of unification which has explicitly the two
moments of representation that we have analysed. To achieve the benefits of
social life, Hobbes wrote, it is necessary for men to appoint one man, or
assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own, and acknowledge
himself to be the author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act,
or cause to be acted, In those things which concern the common peace and
safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their
judgments, to his j ~ d g m e n t . ~This
seems clear enough. However in the

remaining lines of this famous paragraph the act of appointing a single
representer to bear the person of many disappears. Hobbes stressed instead the
authorization by each together of the acts of one person, and the power that
flowed logically from this authorization. When he finally defined the essence of
a commonwealth it referred not to appointment, but solely to one person, of
whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made
themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of
them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defence.32I t is
true that Hobbes wrote in the next line that he that carrieth this person is
called sovereign, suggesting that the sovereign represented the single person of
the multitude, but the overriding sense of the passage is clearly that a
commonwealth is at root any person whose actions have been comprehensively
and simultaneously authorized by many individuals, and not a person
appointed specifically to make present the unity of a multitude.
Only at the very end of the chapter is it apparent that the act of appointing a
common representer has become part of a separate question: not that of how
sovereignty is generated, but of how sovereign power is attained. Appointing a
30 It may seem odd to use Gierkes term in this context, but it is useful because it expresses
something more than a mere aggregate of individuals and less than a legal personality. Gierke of
course saw in modern natural law theory in general, and in Hobbess political theory in particular.
a thoroughly individualist philosophy which attempted to patch up its lack of any conception of
the organic wholeness of society by formal, empty doctrines of collective or representative unity.
See his Natural Law and the Theory of Society I500 io 1800, ed. E. Barker (Boston, Beacon Press,
1960), which is a translation of part of the fourth volume of Das Deursche Genossenschaffsrecht,
originally published in 1913. The present paper does not follow Gierkes interpretation. It stands
closer to that of F. Tonnies, and in particular to the view Tonnies expressed in his article Die
Lehre von den Volksversammlungen und die Urversammlung in Hobbes Leviathan, Zeitschr$
fur die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 89 (1930), 1-22 (reprinted in F. Tonnies. Studien zur Philsophie
und Gesellschaffslehre im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. E. G . Jacoby, Stuttgart. Frommann, 1975). This
article, which 1 only discovered after completing my own paper, draws attention to the link
between Hobbess doctrine of the original constitution of the state and modern constitutional
practice. It also makes plain that Tonnies and Gierke disagreed over the interpretation of the
constitution of the Hobbesian state, Gierke placing his emphasis on the contract of each with all,
Tonnies on the constituent will of the majority.
3 1 Leviaihan, p. 112.
32 Leviathan, p. 112.
MURRAY FORSYTH
199
representer is now but one possible way by which a sovereign power is

established, of which the other is when one person acquires such power by
'natural force'.
If we ask why Hobbes was not prepared to pursue the logic of his doctrine of
representation to the very heart of his definition of the essence of the body
politic, the answer is patent. In the last resort the existence of sovereign power
was more important to him than the way it was created. He was not prepared
to maintain that the sovereign by conquest, or by an extension of paternal
power, was less legitimate than a sovereign deliberately constituted by those he
ruled.
Only in the commonwealth by institution then did the full logic of Hobbes's
doctrine of representation emerge into the light of day. The first two
paragraphs of the chapter in which he begins to analyse this form of
commonwealth express the nub of the matter:
A commonwealth is said to be instituted, when a niultitude of men do agree, and
covenant, everji one, with every one, that to whatsoever man, or assembly of men, shall be
given by the major part. the right to prrsmt the person of them all, that is to say, to be
their reprcscwtative; every one, as well he that votedfor it, as he that voted against it,
shall authorize all the actions and judgments, of that man, or assembly of men, in the
same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves,
and be protected against other men.
From this institution of a commonwealth are derived all the rights, and faculties of
him, or them, on whom the sovereign power is conferred by the consent of the people
assembled.
The crux of this definition, and indeed of Hobbes's whole discussion of the
constituted commonwealth, is that he sees the agreement at the root of the
body politic as not only a simultaneous authorization of the actions of one
person by each individual for certain purposes, but as an agreement enabling
all to designate or appoint a single person to put into effect the identical goals
they all have. The underlying covenant is thus no ordinary one: it allows a
single constitutive will to act, and thereby transforms the contractors from
mere contractors into members of a constituent body. I t is a contract to go
beyond contract.
This affirmation by Hobbes of the self-transformatory nature of the contract
is a recognition too that at the root of the constituted commonwealth stands
not merely a multitude of individuals, but a multitude determined to give the
unity latent in its multiplicity a distinct, appropriate, instituted shape and
form. At the root of the constituted commonwealth there stands, in a word,
the 'people'. The people are the constituent power of the body politic, it is they
who 'make present' their unity in constituting a sovereign.
If the people in Leviathan are more than a mere multitude, they are by the
same token less than a constituted commonwealth. There is no account in
Leviathan of a sequence from an original democratic commonwealth to an
aristocratic or monarchic one, as there was in the Elemenrs and De Cive.
Hobbes simply stressed the need for an original covenant-tacit or open-to
abide by the decision of the major part regarding the declaration of the
sovereign, and argued that there could be but three forms of sovereign:
J3
Lrviulhun. p. I13
200
T H O M A S H O B B E S A N D T H E C O N S T I T U E N T POWER
monarchy, democracy, or aristocracy. He added that it is manifest, that men

who are in absolute liberty, may, if they please, give authority to one man, to
represent them every one; as well as give such authority to any assembly of
men whatsoever; and consequently may subject themselves, if they think good,
to a monarch, as absolutely, as to any other repre~entative.~~
In other words
the people as constituent power stand in Leviathan as a distinct force behind
all constituted forms of sovereignty. The lex regia has been left behind and the
modern state foreshadowed.
It is true that Hobbes argued that in the process of constituting a sovereign,
the latter made no covenant beforehand with the whole multitude, as one
party, because as yet they are not one person.35 Does this invalidate the
thesis of a constituent will? Not necessarily. Hobbes, it may be suggested, was
not denying the presence of such a will; he was denying that this will was itself
a constituted unity, or one person. He was asserting that it was impossible for
the sovereign to enter into a covenant with the will that constituted the
sovereign. Equally he asserted that it was absurd for the constituent will to
proceed by way of covenant. Its task was precisely to create a unity; if it
made a bargain with another it renounced its whole vocation.
More important were Hobbess indications-admittedly sketchy-of the
actual way in which the work of constitution was achieved. Here he spoke of
an assembled congregation making decrees, and of the dissenting minority
standing to what the major part should ordain.36 Once again we can see that,
far from being a covenant or contract, constitution-making was a unilateral
act. We the people do ordain and establish-the echo with later practice is
clear.
In the Elements and De Cive then the sovereign and the people are identical,
in Leviathan the sovereign represents the person of the commonwealth, or is
the representative of the people, or beareth the person of the people.37 I shall
not attempt in the remaining pages to examine all the results or consequences
of this crucial differentiation in Hobbess political theory, but will dwell only
on two salient points.
The first relates to the double-sided process of constitution. At first sight it
seems curious that Hobbes should have stressed so strongly in relation to the
instituted commonwealth that there were two elements in the constitutive act :
the appointment of a representative and authorization of the representatives
actions. Surely the act of the majority in endowing one person with the right to
represent the person of them all was in itself authorization? Hobbess emphasis
has its own logic however. It prevents any assumption that the body politic or
the state is simply an institution for carrying out the will of the majority. It
underlines the end for which a common representative is chosen, and the scope
of his powers, namely to give effect to the unanimous will, the will of every
single person, for a peaceable social life, and protection against others.
A comparison with the doctrine of the people as constituent power as it
Leviathan, p. 121.
Leviathan, p. 114.
3 6 Leviathan, p. 115.
3 7 Even when Hobbes on one occasion (Leviathan, p. 176) says the sovereign is the person of
the commonwealth he goes beyond the sense of De Cive and the Elements which is that the
sovereign is the city or commonwealth.
34
35
MURRAY FORSYTH
20 1
developed at the time of the French Revolution may help to make Hobbess
logic on this point clearer. The Abbe Sieyes, who was arguably the greatest
theorist of the pouvoir constituant, described the process of founding the body
politic as follows:
A political association is the work of the unanimous will of the associates.
Its public establishment is the result of the majority will of the associates. Unanimity
being a very difficult thing to achieve in the smallest of communities, it is clear that it
becomes impossible in a society of several million individuals. The social union has its
ends; it is necessary therefore to use such means as are possible to achieve them; it is
necessary therefore to be satisfied with the majority. But it is worth observing that even
then there is a kind of mediate unanimity, for those who have unanimously willed to
unite to enjoy the advantages of society, have unanimously willed all the means
necessary to procure these advantages. The choice of the means alone is delivered over
to the majority, and all those who have their wish to express, agree in advance to abide
constantly by this majority. Hence two respects in which the majority rightly substitutes
itself for the right of unanimity. The general will is thus formed by the will of the
majority.
All public powers without distinction are an emanation of the general will, all come
from the People, that is to say, the Nation. These two terms ought to be synonymous.38
Sieyess concept of mediate unanimity helps to illuminate Hobbess doctrine

of representation and authorization, as indeed it illuminates the whole mission,
in political terms, of the doctrine of the social contract. His equation of the
people and the nation, is also interesting, for the people to whom Hobbes
in the Leviathan ascribes the work of constitution are precisely what Sieyes and
many subsequent writers have meant by the nation-that is to say not a static
aggregate of atoms, but a unity capable of constitutive action.
Having noted this parallel, however, it has to be said immediately that for
Hobbes the people acted once and once only. Beyond the great initial creative
act he saw no role for them. He did not, for example, envisage the people being
consulted by the constituted power at times of constitutional crisis, and indeed
always stressed that the destruction of the constituted power was a return to
mere anarchy. In describing the development of Hobbess doctrine of the
people as constituent power it is not necessary to exaggerate the degree to
which he elaborated or endorsed it.
This leads on to the final aspect of Hobbess doctrine of the creation of the
body politic that merits discussion, namely his notion of the commonwealth
by acquisition or of sovereign power attained not by institution or constitution, but by natural force. To what extent was he justified in placing these
two kinds of body politic on the same level? More specifically, to what extent
did his definition of acquisition betray the theory of representation and
authorization that we have been concerned to map out?
Hobbes actually distinguished two different kinds of sovereignty acquired by
natural force: paternal and despotical. The first of these need not be treated
here. The second was identical with sovereignty acquired by conquest, or
victory in war. In what precisely did it consist? Hobbes emphasized strongly
that it was the result of a covenant. The covenant might be open or tacit, and
3 8 E. Sieyes. Reconnoissunce et Exposilion ruisonnie des Droirs de /Hornme 6 du Citoym (Paris.
1789), pp, 38-9, my translation.
202
T H O M A S H O B B E S A N D T H E C O N S T I T U E N T POWER
could be made by single individuals, or by many together by plurality of

voices.39 It was not the act of surrender on the field of battle, nor was it a
peace treaty between two sides, equal in status, who had been in a state of war.
It was rather the release of the prisoner of war, or internee, in exchange for his
obedience to the commands of the victor. Hobbes did not hesitate to call the
sovereignty that it established the dominion of the master over his ~ervant.~
It was acquired to the victor when the vanquished, to avoid the present stroke
of death, covenanteth either in express words, or by other sufficient signs of the
will, that so long as his life, and the liberty of his body is allowed him, the
victor shall have the use thereof, at his pleasure. And after such covenant
made, the vanquished is a SERVANT and not before. . .41
The covenant here described is in effect an exchange of the bare minimum of
freedom for the surrender of the rest. In Hobbess terminology it was the
exchange of the use of liberty for the absence of the physical impediment of
another natural body. The right men received may thus be termed a nudum ius:
the right to live this side of prison, but nothing more.
There can be little doubt that a commonwealth established in this way is
separated by a wide gulf from the commonwealth by institution or constitution
already described. The one is a positive act of representation and authorization
by a people free to choose how their peace and security is to be established.
The other is merely authorization under duress. It is but the step by one or
many individuals from outright slavery to serfdom. The latter is indeed a stage
in the historic development of freedom, but it differs from the former as the
absolute minimum differs from the mean.
There is thus a radical disjunction between the commonwealth by institution
and the commonwealth by acquisition, and by suggesting that they differed
only in detail, Hobbes in effect made the whole process of constituting a
commonwealth an exercise which need not take place in reality at all. He
robbed it of its practical necessity; it was reduced to a guiding idea. For some
this deprives his theory of virtually all its value. But the reverse side of the
equation must not be ignored. If the constituted commonwealth was reduced to
a Platonic idea, by the same token the commonwealth by acquisition was
provided with an idea to guide and enlighten it. Thus Hobbess equation of the
commonwealth by acquisition and the commonwealth by constitution showed
indeed that in the extreme situation of civil war, he wished first and foremost
for de facro peace. He did not mind whether sovereign power came into
existence through a proper process of constitution or not. It had to exist and
superior military strength could achieve this as well as anything. On the other
hand his equation of the commonwealth by constitution and the commonwealth by acquisition showed also that he realized that a purely military
solution would not be enough to create a lasting peace. To achieve this the
conqueror or victor would have to act in accordance with the positive
principles, the positive idea, which stood at the heart of the commonwealth by
constitution. The victor would have to act as if the people had commirred him
with sovereign power. He would have to act in the spirit of one who had been
Leviathan, p. 129.
Leviathan, p. 132.
4 1 kviathan, p. 132.
39
40
MURRAY FORSYTH
203
designated by the people as constituent power in order to give their will for
peace, society, and protection against others, reality and effectiveness. If he
merely said with Louis XIV, LEtat cest mi!-the
whole body politic is
encompassed in one-there was no future for the commonwealth. If however
he said with Frederick the Great that the prince is the first servant of the state
then there was a future for it. Princedom plus service: that was the essence of
Hobbess concept of political representation. Its weakness was precisely that it
rested on the insight or enlightenment of particular sovereigns for its fulfilment,
their ability to perceive, like Hobbes, where the true source and legitimacy of
their power lay.
As the opening paragraph of this study indicated, it was not until the latter
part of the eighteenth century that the idea of the people as the constituent
power descended from the realm of guiding ideas and became a political
reality. Hobbes, while he was one of the very earliest, was not of course the
only person to conceive the idea before the reality.42 Nor, of course, had he the
same conception of the form of government as the bulk of the protagonists of
the people as constituent power in the later period. On this issue he remained
all too imprisoned in the ancient classical categorization of government which
focused solely on whether power was wielded by one, few, or many natural
persons.43 This crude material classification was destined to fade away once
the underlying representative character of all natural persons who hold public
power became more fully understood. On the basic issue of the nature of
constitution-making by the people, however, Hobbes not only was remarkably
prescient, but in some respects more clear-sighted than many of those who
struggled later on behalf of the peoples power without understanding the
modalities of its realization.
4 2 The Levellers had an embryonic conception of the people as the constituent power, and
Locke developed a sophisticated notion of it in his Second Treatke of Governrnenr (Ch. VIlI
especially). J. H. Franklin, in his study John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1978), draws particular attention to the pioneering work of George
Lawson in this context.
4 3 It is this above all that has led modern writers, such as A. E. Taylor-following
Pufendorfs
earlier example-to argue that there is a bargain to which the sovereign is a party in the
constitution of civil society. (The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes. in Hobbes Studies, ed. K . C.
Brown, Oxford. Blackwell, 1963.) For how can the people transmit sovereignty to a natural person
without some form of acceptance, and hence some form of contract o r covenant? Howard
Warrender follows a slightly different path in arguing that although there is no covenant between
subjects and sovereign in Hobbess constituted commonwealth, there ought to have been. The
commonwealth by constitution should, he thinks, have been placed on the same basis as the
commonwealth by acquisition. (The Political Philosophy o j Hobbes. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
1957, p. 138.) M. T. Dalgarno goes a step further and attempts to indicate the precise kind of
cotsenant that links subjects and sovereign in Hobbess commonwealth by institution. (Analysing
Hobbess Contract, Proceedings of the Aristorelian Sociery. 76 (1976). 209-26.) For all the
ingenuity of their arguments, these writers seem to me to ignore the logical strength and the
historical significance of Hobbess explicit contention that the appointment of a government by a
people cannot take the form of a contract or covenant. Hobbess fault-if I may express it in this
way-was not that he questioned the equation of constituting a government with a contract, but
that he did not stress enough the fact that what was constituted was not one or many natural
persons, but offices or institutions manned by natural persons.
ThomasHobbes:Powerin the Stateof Nature,

Powerin Civil Society
JamesH. Read
College of St. Benedict& St. John's Universityof Minnesota
ThomasHobbesmaynot be thefirstpowertheoristin thehistoryof

westernpoliticalthought,buthe is surelyamongthemostthoroughly
studied.ThisessayanalyzeshowHobbes'sdescription
of power
from thestateof natureto civilsociety.
changesin the transition
Whilethezero-sumideaof powerdoesnot change,theauthorargues
thatthechangedcontextfrom a stateof warof eachagainstall to one
in whichcommoninterestscan be realizedresultsin differentreasons
beinggivento justifythe use of power.In civilsociety,thezero-sum
conceptionbecomestheparadigm
for thesovereignpowerof
command.
JamesH. Readis AssistantProfessorof Government
at the College
of St. BenedictandSt. John'sUniversity
of Minnesota.He has
at work
publishedotherarticleson the ideaof powerandis currently
on a bookdealingwiththeconcept.
The Power of a Man (to take it Universally),is his presentmeansto obtain some
futureapparentGood.
-Leviathan
Becausethe powerof one man resistethand hindereththe effectsof another:power
simplyis no more, but the excessof the powerof one above that of another.For
equal powers opposed, destroy one another; and such opposition is called
contention.
-Elements of Law
It is often taken for grantedthat Hobbes has a zero-sumunderstanding

of power: one's gain is by definition another's loss.' This may seem
1. See for instanceThomasA. Spragens,Jr., The Politics of Motion: The Worldof
ThomasHobbs (Lexington:Universityof KentuckyPress, 1973), p. 190; see also C. B.
Macpherson,ThePoliticalTheoryof PossessiveIndividualism(Oxford:OxfordUniversity
Press, 1962)as well as his Introductionto the Penguineditionof Leviathan(New York:
Penguin, 1968),pp. 32-39.
Polity
Polity
Number 44
VolumeXXIII,
XXIII, Number
Summer 1991
Summer 1991
This content downloaded from 205.133.226.104 on Sat, 12 Dec 2015 05:00:36 UTC
506 Powerin the Stateof Nature
altogether obvious, since Hobbes himself, in the second of the two

passages quoted above, tells us directly that one's gain of power is
another'sloss. Yet the puzzleposed by the first passagein its relationto
the second has not receivedsufficientattention.Whenpower is defined
(in the firstpassage)as the presentmeansto obtainsome futureapparent
good, nothinglogicallyrequiresthat one's gain must come at another's
expense.Why then does Hobbesclaimthat in practicepoweris no more
than "the excess of the power of one above that of another."?2
One answerto this questionis straightforward.In the state of nature
as Hobbes describesit, wheretrustis nonexistent,one is forcedto act as
if one's gain were alwaysanother'sloss, even though, as Hobbes points
out, the collectiveoutcome of such action is loss for almost everyone.
And from this diffidenceof one another,there is no way for any
man to securehimselfe, so reasonable,as Anticipation;that is, by
force, or wiles, to masterthe personsof all men he can, so long, till
he see no otherpowergreatenoughto endangerhim:And this is no
more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally
allowed.3
Under such conditions, a purely relative descriptionof power is appropriate.
But if this is the reasonwhy poweris describedin zero-sumterms,then
the establishmentof a civil state, which makes trust and cooperation
possible, should also change Hobbes's descriptionof power. In fact it
does not: even here, where the existenceof common interestsand the
means to realizethem are admitted,Hobbes describespower in purely
relativeterms.The powerof the Sovereign,for instance,is a functionof
the lack of powerof the subjects:"The Power and Honour of Subjects
vanishethin the presenceof the Power Sovereign."4Whyshouldthis be?
The fact that the Sovereignremainsin the state of naturewith respectto
his subjectsdoes not answerthe question, because an established,uncontestedSovereignlacks the destructiveorientationtowardhis subjects
that makesthe stateof naturea zero-sumbattlefield."The riches,power
and honourof a Monarch,"Hobbestells us, "ariseonly fromthe riches,
strength,and reputationof his Subjects,"5and thus the Sovereignhas no
2. Thesecondof the two passagesabovecomesfroma workwrittena decadeearlierthan
Leviathan,and Hobbes'sideas changedin manyrespects.But the passagefromElements
of Law accuratelycharacterizespowerin the stateof natureas portrayedin Chapter13 of
Leviathan.
3. ThomasHobbes,Leviathan,Chapter13 (New York:Penguin1968),p. 184.
4. Leviathan,Ch. 18, p. 237.
5. Ibid., Ch. 19, pp. 241-42.
JamesH. Read 507

reasondeliberatelyto weakenor harmhis subjects.This is not the case,
however, among men in the originalstate of nature. In short, it seems
that Hobbes'szero-sumconceptof poweris most appropriateto precisely those conditions which the formation of civil society is intendedto
overcome.
That is the riddleI will attemptto unravelin this essay. Along the way,
I hope to shed some new light on certainold problemsconnectedwith
Hobbes'spoliticalphilosophy:the natureof the transitionfromthe state
of natureto civil society;the interplayof force, self-interest,and senseof
obligationin creatingmotives for obedienceto sovereignauthority;the
dynamicsof "chains of command" in Hobbes's commonwealth.But
another aim is to explore the concept of power itself, to gain a better
understandingof the practicalconnectionbetweenpowerunderstoodas
self-relatedcapacity("power-to")and powerunderstoodas a relationof
social control ("power-over").6
The thesis I advanceis that, althoughHobbes's concept of power is
zero-sumboth in the state of natureand in civil society, it is so for quite
differentreasons.Powerin fact changesits naturein the transitionfrom
the state of natureto civil society;it changesfrom naturalto artificial,
and in becomingartificialthe zero-sumformis retainedwhilethe content
changes.Whereasin the state of nature,it is the lack of, or the inability
to realize, common intereststhat makes one's gain of power another's
loss, in civil society, it is the causalfiction underlyingchains of command, which presupposethe existence of common interests, that accounts for the purelyrelativecharacterof power.Hobbesborrowsa concept of power from his natural philosophy-power as unidirectional,
transitivecausality-and constructssocialpowerrelationsso as to mirror
the causal relationsof nature. In the human "state of nature," the war
of all againstall, such unidirectionalcausalrelationsare lacking, which
is preciselythe problem.
This change in the nature of power is made possible by a changed
understandingof power on the part of humanbeings. Hobbes'ssubjects
internalizea certain"picture"of that powerand of their own roles and
obligations. Yet the image of power they internalizeis a strangeone:
whenpoweris describedas unidirectionalcausality,then one's gain is by
6. Forexplicitdiscussionof the "power-to,""power-over"distinction(whichis implicit
in many other analysesof power), see Talcott Parsons, "On the Conceptof Political
Power,"Proceedingsof theAmericanPhilosophicalSociety, 107(1963);WilliamConnolly, Termsof PoliticalDiscourse(Princeton,NJ: PrincetonUniversityPress 1983);Peter
Morriss,Power:A PhilosophicalAnalysis (New York, 1987)as well as an earlieressay,
"The EssentiallyUncontestableConceptsof Power" from Frontiersof Political Theory
(NewYork:St. Martin'sPress, 1980);WilliamH. Riker,"SomeAmbiguitiesin the Notion
of Power," AmericanPoliticalScienceReview,58 (1964):341-49.
508 PowerintheStateof Nature

definitionanother'sloss.Therefore,
eventhoughon thenaturallevelit is
to gainpower,theartificially-created
possiblefor all or mostindividuals
to a zero-sum
poweruponwhichcivilpeacedependsfunctionsaccording
model.Forthisreason,ouranswerto thequestionof whetherit is possibleaccording
to Hobbes'stheoryfor everyoneto becomemorepowerful
mustremainan ambiguousone. I will attemptto makethis basicambiguityas clearas possible.
I beginby describing
thereasonswhyone'sgainof poweris another's
loss in the humanstateof nature.NextI describethe causalconceptof
power in Hobbes'snaturalphilosophyand show why this causal
paradigmdoesnot fit Hobbes'shumanstateof nature.ThenI analyze
thatthey
authorityrelationsin Hobbes'scommonwealth,
emphasizing
do mirrorthecausalparadigm.I thenputthesevariousideastogetherto
of the transitionfromthe stateof natureto civil
providea description
thisstudyof
and
with
somereflectionson theimplications
close
society,
of the notionof
Hobbescarriesfor our moregeneralunderstanding
power.
I. The Definition of Power and Basic Human Motives
Letus beginby recallingHobbes'smostgeneraldefinitionof poweras

one's "presentmeansto obtainsome futureapparentgood." An inas
terestingfeatureof thisdefinitionis that,althoughpoweris described
a relation(betweena means,on one hand,andan apparentgoodon the
other),it is not in the firstinstancea relationof controlamonghuman
beings.Onecanin principleattainapparentgoodsthroughisolatedactivitieswhichaffectno one. Relationsof controlenterthediscussionimmediately,however,for practicalreasons:typically,the attainmentof
apparentgoods dependson others;one's own "naturalpower"is
insufficient."Therefore
to haveservants,is Power;To havefriends,is
Power:for theyarestrengthsunited."7Thecooperation,willingor unpowers,"
willing,of othersfalls underthe categoryof "instrumental
withoutwhichwe wouldbe incapableof attainingmostof the apparent
goodswe seek.
oneshouldnotethatnothingin thisgeneraldefinitionof
Furthermore,
powerrequiresthatthepowerof onecomeat theexpenseof thepowerof
another.Whetherand to what degreethis occurs dependson the
of theapparentgoodsat whichone aims,andon themethods
character
of others.Letus turn,then,to thepracusedto securethe cooperation
James H. Read
509
tical conditions under which one tries to obtain apparent goods in the
state of nature.
Hobbes writes in Chapter 13 of the Leviathan:
If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End,
(which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their
delectation only), endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another.8
Clearly if power is the means to some good, then in cases where that
good is such that one can only enjoy it at another's expense, the power of
one comes at the expense of the power of another. But for what reasons
does it happen that different men desire the same thing that they cannot
both enjoy? They might after all desire different things; or they might
desire the same thing in such a way that both can enjoy it. We need to
look more specifically at the causes of quarrel. Later in the same chapter
Hobbes gives a more concrete description of the causes of conflict:
So that in the nature of man, we find three principall causes of
quarrell. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.
The first maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety;
and the third, for Reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves Masters of other mens persons, wives, children, and cattell;
the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile,
a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue, either direct
in their Persons, or by reflexion in their Kindred, their Friends,
their Nation, their Profession, or their Name.9
Clearly all of these causes of quarrel can and do combine with one
another in complex ways. But let us examine them separately, since the
reasons why each is a cause of quarrel are different in each case.
We shall begin with Glory, as it is the strongest example of irreconcilable conflict. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes defines Glory as "that
passion which proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our
own power, above the power of him that contendeth with us."10 Defined
in this way, the desire for glory is a motive perfectly tailored to the
description of power as the excess of the power of one over that of
another. One man's glory is another's lack of glory: it cannot be otherwise. Thus if glory were the only good for which human beings strive, or
8. Ibid., Ch. 13, p. 184.

9. Ibid., Ch. 13, p. 185.
10. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928),
Ch. 9, p. 28.
always the most importantgood, then the power of one would always
come at the expenseof the power of another.Even the formationof a
peaceful state, though it might protect men from violent death, would
merelycondemnmost men to a miserableexistence, frustratedin their
desireto attain what they want most.
But though Hobbes clearlyconsidersthe desirefor glory to be an importantmotive, he deniesthat it is the principalmotive. He claimsthat
the aim of men who endeavorto destroyothers"is principallytheirowne
conservation";he adds that "delectation,"underwhich categoryglory
would presumablyfall, is sometimesa motive. Hobbesdoes not provide
any psychologicalanalysisof the motive itself, nor does he make clear
exactlyhow stronga motive glory is relativeto motivesother than selfpreservation.In any event, it would be difficultin the state of natureto
disentangleglory from gain or safety as a motive for quarrel.In civil
society, on the other hand, supposingthat one's safety and welfareare
reasonablysecure,glory emergesas a separateand disruptivemotive;it
may even tempt someoneto rebel againsta sovereign,Hobbes is clearly
worriedabout this motive. When he describesself-preservationas the
strongesthumanmotive, he is not merelydescribingbut also prescribing:
human beings should be persuadedto care less about glory and more
about peace and self-preservation.
To seek "Gain" or "Safety" is quite different from seeking glory,
since in the lattercase one's gain is by definitionanother'sloss, whilein
the firsttwo casesthe matteris morecomplex.Onemay sometimesenjoy
wealthpreciselybecauseothers lack what you have-luxury goods, for
instance-but this is dependenton the personand the situation;thereare
many other benefitsof materialwealththat do not dependon invidious
comparisons.Nor does the pursuitof wealth always come at another's
expense, for one can acquirewealth in any numberof different ways.
Some ways of acquiring wealth come directly at another's expense;
othersdo not. Hobbes recognizesthe possibilityof commongain in the
economicsphere;one of the problemswiththe stateof natureis precisely
that suchpotentialcommoninterestscannotbe realized:"In suchcondition, thereis no placefor Industry;becausethe fruitthereofis uncertain;
and consequentlyno Cultureof the Earth;no Navigation,nor use of the
commoditiesthat may be importedby Sea . .."
With "Safety" there is even less reason why one's gain should entail
another'sloss. One can pursuesafety either throughpeace or war; but
unlessone enjoys war for its own sake, one turnsto war reluctantlyand
11. Leviathan, Ch. 13, p. 186.
James H. Read
511
as a second-best solution, because in the long run war makes safety more
difficult for everyone. This is a case in which gain for one side is gain for
the other-assuming that peace and safety are the real aims of both sides.
Hobbes admits that there are some men who truly enjoy war and conquest, but for the most part he describes the motives responsible for the
"general inclination" to seek "power after power" as primarily defensive: power is necessary simply to secure what one has, including one's
life. But if most human beings do in fact seek safety and peace, why is it
so difficult to secure? In part it is because of the few who do enjoy war,
but mostly because of the absence of trust. If neither side can be sure that
the other will honor his agreement to "lay down his arms," then war will
continue to subsist even among those who genuinely desire peace.
Hobbes's Fundamental Law of Nature perfectly reflects this problem:
"That every man, ought to endeavor Peace, as farre as he has hope of
obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all
helps, and advantages of Warre."'2 Peace cannot be obtained without
Covenant, and Covenants are extremely fragile in the state of Nature.
Let us recall at this point the two passages quoted at the beginning of
the essay-the "present means" definition and the claim that power for
one means lack of power for another. Our discussion so far has made
clear that nothing in Hobbes's account of basic human aims requires a
zero-sum understanding of power.13
II. Power as Cause
Nothing yet has been said about the means used to secure another's
cooperation-about power as control, power as the instrumental use of
other human beings. Even in cases where the aim of one is compatible
with the aim of another, the power of one might come at another's expense for reasons connected with the methods used to realize the aim.
Since many if not most aims depend on the actions or inactions of others,
we must ask how one will cause another to act in the appropriate way. If
the methods someone uses to cause me to serve his ends prevent me from
realizing my ends, then his gain of power is my loss, even if our aims are
compatible in the abstract. We might both, for example, desire leisure, a
good which, unlike glory, does not logically depend on the deprivation of
another; but his gain is indeed my loss if his method of securing leisure is
12. Ibid., Ch. 14, p. 190.

13. For interpretations of the relative importance of glory which differ from mine, see
Spragens, pp. 182-83 and 190-91, and Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), Ch. 11.
to enslaveme. We mustthereforeconsidernot only Hobbes'sdescription

of typical aims, but also his descriptionof typical methodsof control.
But before we considerpower-as-controlon the humanlevel, it is instructiveto examinepower-as-controlin Hobbes's naturalphilosophy.
Many studentsof Hobbes arguethat there exists a disjunctionbetween
his descriptionof natureand his descriptionof humansocietyand motivation, despite the fact that Hobbes apparentlythought his political
philosophywas firmlybased on naturalscience.14I do not quarrelwith
the scholarswho make this claim. Yet some of the patternsunderlying
Hobbes's natural philosophy have striking parallels in his political
philosophy,especiallythe patternsrelatedto powerand causality.These
patterns, even if they cannot be directly transferredto the political
sphere, may neverthelessoffer new insights into Hobbes's theory of
politicalpower.
In Hobbes's naturalphilosophy,the concept of power is identicalto
that of cause.15In De Corporehe writes:"Correspondentto cause and
effect, are POWERand ACT; nay, those and these are the same things;
thoughfor diverseconsiderations,they have diversenames." He goes on
to say:
For whensoeverany agent has all those accidentswhichare necessarily requisitefor the productionof some effect in the patient,
then we say the agent haspower to producethat effect, if it be applied to a patient. .. [T]hesameaccidents,whichconstitutethe efficient cause, constitutealso the power of the agent . .16
Power-or causality-in nature has some interestingcharacteristicsin
Hobbes'sperfectlydeterministicuniverse.Thereare no partialcauses:if
A is the causeof B, then it is the completecauseof B; thereare no plural
causes. Furthermore,it follows that powerin natureis unidirectional:if
A is the causeof B, then B is in no sensethe cause of A; A and B cannot
exert power over one another simultaneously,Furthermore,power is
transitive:if A is the causeof B, and B the causeof C, thenA is the cause
of C; there is no point at which any other partialcauses of C can enter
into the chain of events, nor can C function as a cause with respectto
either B or A.
How does this conception of power comparewith the definition of
14. See for instanceStrauss,Political Philosophy of Hobbes; Spragens,pp. 164 ff;
StanleyBenn, "Hobbes on Power," in Hobbs and Rousseau,ed. Cranstonand Peters
(New York:Anchor, 1972),pp. 184-212.
of Hobbes'sconceptionof causalityand powerhas profitedfrom
15. My understanding
StanleyBenn'sessay "Hobbeson Power."
16. ThomasHobbes,De Corpore.Citationborrowedfrom Benn, pp. 187-88.
JamesH. Read 513

humanpowerdiscussedabove, i.e., poweras one's presentmeansto obtain some futureapparentgood? The two are not identical,but neither
are they obviously inconsistent. Power on the human level could be
regardedas an effective cause of the "apparentgood" one seeks.
But more interestingare the implicationsof this conceptof causality
for the exerciseof power over other humanbeings. Suppose for a momentthat the units of causeand effect hereare humanindividualsrather
than atoms and forces. An individualexercisingpower over another
would exercisecompletepower;it would be the most absoluteof tyrannies. Furthermore,one's gain of power would be another's loss for
reasonsthat have nothingto do withthe compatibilityor incompatibility
of intentions.The zero-sumconditionwould be a pure formality:if individualA is "cause," then individualB is "effect"; A is active, powerful, causal; B is passive, a mere effect. Finally, it would be possibleto
construct chains of command of indefinite length: suppose A (the
Sovereign)is the first causein the chainof causesand effects. If he is the
causeof B's action, and B the causeof C's action, and C the causeof D's
action, and so on without limit, then, in this perfectly deterministic
world, A's powerhas perfectlyand absolutelydeterminedthe actionsof
all of the others. Hobbes of courseadmitsthat only God, as the first of
all causes, possessessuch absolutesovereignty.
This strictlycausal, unidirectionalpowerexistingin natureis precisely
what is lackingin the human"state of nature."This is madeclearin the
openingparagraphof Chapter13 of Leviathan:
Nature have made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and
mind;as that thoughtherebee found one man sometimesmanifestly strongerin body, or of quickermindthananother;yet whenall is
reckonedtogether,the differencebetweenman, and man, is not so
considerable,as that one man can thereuponclaimto himselfeany
benefit, to whichanothermay not pretend,as well as he. For as to
the strengthof body, the weakesthas strengthenough to kill the
strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacywith
others, that are in the same dangerwith himselfe.17
Yet victoryis short-lived:"And the Invaderagainis in the like dangerof
another."Humanbeingsdo exercisepoweroverone another(all of these
successiveinvasionsare expressionsof power)but the dynamicsof power
in no way resemblethe perfectunidirectionalityof naturalcausality.IndividualA may be strongerthan B, but the latterof quickerwit than A;
therefore,each could exercisepowerover the otherin some respect.Fur17. Leviathan, Ch. 13, p. 183.
thermore,circlesof power-impossible in naturalcausality-may occur

here:A mightcommandB, B mightdispossessC, and C kill A. Nothing
guaranteesthat chains of causes and effects on the human level will
travelin one directiononly.
This does not mean, of course,that the humansphereis separatefrom
that of naturalcausality;Hobbesmakesit quiteclearthat humanbeings
are just as determinedby naturalcauses and effects as anythingelse in
nature,animateor inanimate.But thesecausesand effects operateat the
level of some materialsubstratum,not at the level of humanindividuals
and humanintentions.Causesand effects continueas they alwayshave,
but in the state of naturethey have almost no connectionwith human
aims becausehumanintentionsare not effective causes of anything.
One can examinemore closelythe ineffectivenessof humanintentions
as causesby consideringthreeof the basicmethodsby whichone individual might cause another to act in a certain way: force; persuasion
("Counsell"1);and commandbasedon obligation.Thesethreemethods
of control are quite differentfrom one another(some importantdifferenceswill be discussedbelow);but they are alikein that none of themcan
be used effectively in the state of nature. No one is strong enough to
establish lasting power based on force alone; persuasiondepends on
unstablecongruencesof interest,and on trust (whichis absent);obligation dependson prioragreementand on someoneable to enforceagreements. As a consequence,humanbeingsin the state of natureare relatively powerless,both with respectto realizingaims and with respectto
determiningthe actions of others. Everyoneacts as though one's gain
were another'sloss (zero-sum);the collectiveconsequenceis the loss of
power for everyone(negative-sum).
III. Coercion, Command,and Counsel
Let us now jump forwardto the dynamicsof powerunderan established
civil societywith an effectiveSovereign,leavingasidefor the momentthe
question of how sovereigntyis established.The first thing one notices
about the operationof power is that now it is, or at least seems to be,
unambiguouslycausaland unidirectionalin its operations.Thisis clearly
truefor the powerof the Sovereign,and since(as will be discussedbelow)
the Sovereignsomehow embodiesall the power in the entire society, it
follows that powerexhibitsthe samecharacteristicswhereverin societyit
is found. What are those characteristics?
18. "Counsell,is wherea mansaith,Doe, or Doe not this, anddeducethhis reasonsfrom
the benefitthat arrivethby it to him to whomhe saith it." Leviathan,Ch. 25, p. 303.
JamesH. Read 515
A few passages from the Leviathanwill illustratethe way in which

sovereignpoweris implicitlydescribedas strictcausality.Firstconsider
Hobbes's definitionof "command," a privilegethat lies at the core of
sovereignpower: "Commandis, where a man saith, doe this, or Doe
not this, without expectingother reasonthan the Will of him that says
it."19 Command is distinguishedfrom "counsel," in which one attempts to persuadeanotherthat a certainaction is to the other's own
benefit, but without possessingany authorityto commandthe other to
act. The conceptof commanddirectlymirrorsnaturalcausality:the will
of the one who commandsis, at least in principle,the efficient cause of
the other's action. No "partialcauses," like the self-interestof the commandedsubject,play any role here;it is as if the one who is commanded
possessedno will of his own.
Hobbes's notion of Dominion, which establishesthe right to command, likewise mirrorsnaturalcausality. In Chapter20 of Leviathan,
Hobbes describesthe characteristicof Dominion:
He that hath the Dominion over the Child, hath Dominion also
over the childrenof the Child;and over their Children'sChildren.
For he that hath Dominion over the person of a man hath
Dominion over all that is his.20
The resemblancesbetweenDominion and a naturalchain of causesand
effects are difficult to overlook;only if we think of dominionin strictly
causaltermsdoes the passageabovemakesense. Hobbesclaimsthat if A
has dominion over B ("the Child") and B dominion over C ("the
childrenof the Child"), then A necessarilyhas dominionover C. It is the
same as sayingthat if A is the cause of B and B the cause of C, then A
is the causeof both B and C. One shouldrecallthat in the humanstateof
nature, power does not follow this unidirectionalpattern. Dominion,
like command, mirrors natural causality only because it has been
designedthat way; neitherdominionnor commandis natural.
Once one begins to look for it, one notices the same causal pattern
throughoutHobbes's politicaltheory. Hobbes's rejectionof separation
of powers, for example, displaysthe same logic. To limit the power of
another is to exercise power over him and, according to Hobbes,
whoevercan limit the powerof anotheris the latter'smaster:"that King
whose power is limited, is not superiorto him, or them that have the
powerto limitit; and he that is not superior,is not supreme;that is to say
19. Ibid., Ch. 25, p. 303.

20. Ibid., Ch. 20, p. 255.

not Sovereign."21Once again, poweris describedas though it operated
along strictlycausal lines: if the king is "cause," the assemblymust be
"effect"; king and assemblycannot both be causalwith respectto each
other at the same time.
If power relations do not naturallyfollow the unidirectionalcausal
pattern,how is it possibleto constructthemin accordancewith that pattern?To answerthis question,it is necessaryto look more closely at the
basic mechanismsof control:persuasion,coercion, and obligation.All
threeof these are effectiveto some limiteddegreein the state of nature,
for if they were not, Hobbes could not build upon them. They may
overlapand blend in any numberof ways, but they remainanalytically
distinct.Persuasion(or in Hobbes'sterms, "Counsell")dependson the
presentexistenceof sharedinterestsbetweenthe one who persuadesand
the one who is persuaded.Coercionimpliesthe absenceof sharedinterests, or at least the inabilityto motivatethe otherby appealingto shared
interests. Thus, coercion is the method most appropriateto the pure
zero-summodel of powerwhereinterestsare irreconcilableand for that
reason one's gain is another'sloss. Obligationis based on prior agreementand is supposedto bindwhetheror not it is one's presentinterestto
fulfill the obligation.We can assumethat the originalagreementestablishingthe obligationwas based on perceivedcommon interest,but the
agreementis bindingeven if it is no longerin the presentinterestof one
or the other to fulfill his end of the bargain.If the other has performed
first, for example,one may be temptedto default. Obligation,therefore,
to be effective, must be backed by the power to compel. Nevertheless,
despite this need for enforcement,obligation is qualitativelydifferent
from coercion,just as both of these are distinctfrom persuasion.
If we keep in mind the respectivecharacteristicsof persuasion,coercion, and obligation, while recallingthe artificiallyconstructedcausal
model of powerdiscussedearlier,we notice some interestingthings.Persuasion is unique in that it can in no way be assimilatedto the causal
model: the persuader'sargumentsare never a sufficient cause of the
desiredoutcome; the self-interestof the other is always necessaryas a
partial cause of the desired outcome. Furthermore,persuasionrarely
moves in one directiononly; far more common is the bargainingsituation in which each side seeks to persuadethe other, or in other words,
seeks to exercisepower over the other. Thereforepersuasiondisplays
none of the formalcharacteristicsof a strictlycausalchainof command.
The threat or direct applicationof force, in contrast, does approxi-
21. Ibid., Ch. 19, p. 246.
James H. Read 517
mate the formal characteristics of natural causality. Suppose one

possessing a preponderance of military force confronts another who is
wholly unarmed. If the former simply kills or imprisons the latter, then
the act of control is purely unidirectional. Suppose on the other hand the
desired behavior is induced by means of threats: do such and such or I
will kill you. In this case, the act of control is not unambiguously causal,
for there are after all times when human beings choose to die rather than
obey, but it comes very close because most of the time this "cause" will
achieve the desired "effect."
But this is not the only way in which to mirror natural causality. Power
relations based on an internalized sense of obligation may likewise be
constructed according to a unidirectional causal model and may operate
with very little use or threat of coercion. Consider, for instance, the
military chain of command. In theory, the manner in which superiors
command inferiors is strictly unidirectional: the general commands the
colonel who commands the sergeant, and so on; never does a sergeant
command a captain, a captain a colonel, a colonel a general. It is as
though one billiard ball were striking another, and that one a third, the
third a fourth. This simplified military model describes well the way in
which, at least in principle, the power of Hobbes's sovereign is communicated.
How is this mysteriously efficient chain of causes and effects possible?
One might point out, correctly, that formal command is not the only
form of power here, that subordinates in the military or in a civilian
bureaucracy possess any number of means of exercising power over their
superiors. Yet the formal chain of command does operate to an important degree, for if it did not, the organi7ation would collapse. To the
degree that it does follow the unidirectional causal pattern, it does so
because the chain of command has been deliberately designed to resemble a causal chain and because those within that chain recognize their
duties and roles, not because their actions have been mechanically
"caused." In order for such a chain of command to function effectively,
the behavior of a subordinate must be as much active as reactive; some
degree of initiative and discretion must be entrusted to the subordinate.
Yet insofar as the action is in obedience to a command, it is symbolically
understood by superior and subordinate as though it were strictly cause
and effect. In other words, the causal relation is based on a fiction shared
by superior and subordinate: one knows, at one level, that the subordinate's action is not a direct effect of the superior's will (if it were, no
sense of obligation on the part of the subordinate would be necessary);
on the other hand, one is obligated to "pretend" that the superior's command alone is the cause of the subordinate's obedience.
Whichof thesetwo methodsof mirroringnaturalcausalityis moreimportantfor Hobbes?Certainlyhe considersboth coercionand obligation

necessaryto some degree.But he considersthe latterat leastas important
as the former,if not moreso. Otherwise,why wouldhe considerit so important that men know their obligations?22The grounds of the
Sovereign'sright to command, he says, "have the rather need to be
taughtdiligently,and trulytaught;becausethey cannotbe maintainedby
any civil law, or terrorof legal punishment."23
But how are these artificialcausalchains,whetherbasedon obligation
or coercion, establishedin the first place? And how are they relatedto
the first notion of power discussed in this essay, i.e., the means of
obtainingsome apparentgood? Giventhat, on the formallevel at least,
this causal model of poweris zero-sum,does it follow that power itself
remains zero-sum even in civil society? Or should we conclude that
power is not zero-sumsince human beings mutuallysecuretheir "apparentgoods" betterthan in the state of nature?To answersuch questions we mustturn, finally, to an analysisof the transitionfrom the state
of natureto civil society.
IV. Power Transformed
Let us recallat this point the puzzleposed at the beginningof the essay:it
would seem that Hobbes'szero-sumconceptof poweris most appropriate to preciselythose conditionswhichthe formationof civil societyis intended to overcome. By making it possible for most of us (or at least
those of us not motivatedprincipallyby the desire for glory) to better
realizeour "apparentgoods," the presenceof a Sovereignoughtto make
most of us more powerful.Yet Hobbes makesit difficult for us to draw
this conclusion,for powerremainszero-sumin importantrespectsalbeit
for differentreasonsthan in the state of nature. My purposehere is to
show that the transitionfrom the state of natureto civil societydepends
on a redefinitionof power:artificialpoweris created,and predominates
overnaturalpower.Whereason the naturallevelpowerneednot be zerosum in civil society, it is zero-sumby definitionon the artificiallevel.
In Chapter 17 of the Leviathan, Hobbes describes the nature of
sovereign power: "The only way to erect such a Common Power ...
is,
22. BrianBarryasks: "If Hobbes's'message'werethatwe oughtto obey for fearof the

police, why shouldhe have thoughtthat havinghis doctrinetaughtin the universitiesand
preachedin the pulpitswould make Englanda less turbulentcountry?It was precisely
becausehe had seen the fragilityof regimesrestingonly on bayonetsthat he wroteLeviathan." "Warrenderand His Critics,"from Hobbes and Rousseau,pp. 37-65.
JamesH. Read 519
to conferre all their power and strengthupon one Man, or upon one
Assemblyof men, that may reduceall theirWills, by pluralityof voices,
unto one Will."24The power describedhere is qualitativelydifferent
from the types of power found in the state of nature. The method by
which power is created-the conferralof all power and strengthupon
one man or assemblyof men-distinguishes sovereignpower not only
from the powerof an individual,but also fromthe powerof any faction,
no matterhow large.Factionscan existin the stateof nature;sovereignty
cannot. The following passage illustrates the difference between
sovereignpower and factional power:
The Greatestof humanePowers,is that whichis compoundedof
the Powers of most men, united by consent, in one person,
Naturall,or Civill, that has the use of all their Powers depending
on his will; such as is the Power of a Common-wealth:Or depending on the wills of eachparticular;suchas is the Powerof a faction,
or of diversefactions leagued.25
The Power of a commonwealth,whereall wills becomeone, is quite different from that of a faction, where the wills remain particular.One
might suppose that the differencebetweenthe power of a faction and
that of the Sovereignis one of degree, that the Sovereignis simplythe
"biggestfish in the pond," i.e., the most powerfulfactionin the society.
But Hobbes specificallyrejectssuch an interpretation:
... thereis little groundfor the opinionof them, that say of SoveraignKings,thoughthey be singulismajores,of greaterPowerthan
everyone of theirSubjects,yet they be Universisminores,of lesser
powerthan them all together.For if by all together,they meannot
the collectivebody as one person,then all together,and everyone,
signifie the same; and the speechis absurd.But if by all together,
they understandthem as one Person (whichpersonthe Soveraign
bears,) then the power of all together, is the same with the
Soveraign'spower;and so again the speechis absurd.26
Hobbes shows in this passagethat the Sovereignliterallydisposesof all
the powersof all subjects.The one exception,of course,is that each subject retainsthe right of individualself-preservation.
From the perspectiveof natural power, this is impossible:no king,
howeverpowerful, howeverlarge his army, howeverloyal his subjects,
24. Ibid., Ch. 17, p. 227.
25. Ibid., Ch. 10, p. 150.
26. Ibid., Ch. 18, p. 237.
520 Power in the State of Nature
ever has complete control over the actions and possessions of his subjects. Muscles and brains, for instance, are forms of power, yet the
Sovereign does not strip the subjects of their muscles and brains. Nor
does he strip them of "instrumental powers" such as wealth and reputation: "The riches, power and honour of a Monarch arise only from the
riches, strength, and reputation of his Subjects."27 In what sense, then, is
the Sovereign all-powerful?
The all-powerful sovereign is all-powerful only by definition. It is
agreed that he is omnipotent; this is the condition under which power is
granted to him in the first place. It is in the common interest of all to put
an end to the "war of all against all," and according to Hobbes, the only
way to do so is to grant absolute power to someone. Since the power
itself is an invented one, those who design it can endow it with whatever
characteristics they consider necessary or useful to its operation.
Sovereign omnipotence is one of these definitionally-created characteristics; unidirectionality and transitivity, as described in the preceding section, are likewise invented for the purpose. The whole system works
because the subjects themselves accept its symbols and duties. The power
exercised over the subjects originates from the subjects themselves, from
their agreement that there shall be an absolute power. There is nothing
comparable to this for power in the state of nature.28
One could regard sovereign power as a sort of "banking" of natural
powers of individuals: subjects transfer their natural powers over to a
sovereign, who possesses those powers insofar as he reserves the right to
use them in whatever way he considers necessary. But just as in banking
the same money is counted twice-once as a deposit, once again as a
bank loan-so too in this case power is counted twice: the "riches,
strength, and reputation" of the subjects count once as their own, and
once again as instruments under the direction of an all-powerful
sovereign. There are of course flaws in the bank analogy: Hobbes's sub-
27. Ibid., Ch. 19, pp. 241-42.

28. David Johnstonin TheRhetoricof Leviathanwrites:"By depictingsovereigntyas
the productof a positiveact of authorization,foundedupon the unitedstrengthof all subjects, ratherthan an essentiallynegativeact of renunciation[as Johnstonclaimswas the
casein theElementsof Law], it implicatedthosesubjectsin the actsof theirsovereignmore
fullythanthe earlierversionsof his theoryhaddone." TheRhetoricof Leviathan:Thomas
Hobbesand the Politicsof CulturalTransformation
(Princeton,NJ: PrincetonUniversity
Press, 1986),p. 82.
".... No sovereigncould maintainthe powerand rightsof his office withoutachieving
generalrecognitionof the grounds, legitimacy,and properscope of those rights. This
recognitionis in effect the productof an interpretationmen impose upon their circumstances, a set of lenses throughwhichthey read and understandtheirrelationshipswith
others"(84; emphasisadded).
JamesH. Read 521
jects may not freely withdrawthe deposit once made. (Thereis a "substantialpenalty," not merelyfor "early withdrawal"but for any withdrawalat all.) Powermay be susceptibleof universalgain on the natural
level, when countedas belongingto subjects,and yet be zero-sumwhen
regardedas a transferof powerover to the sovereign,whosegain is their
loss. The powerthey transferis differentin naturefrom the powerthey
keep.29
It is the common interestof human beings that establishessovereign

power in the first place. But once established, this power works as
though common interest were unnecessary:command and obligation,
unlike counsel, are supposed to control the actions of subjects independentlyof considerationsof interest.Commoninterestis not partof
the operation of sovereign power because it is common interest that
createssovereignpower. Common interestis an elementbuilt into the
machine itself, so to speak, and there is no need to load the machine
twice.
This is not to deny the role of coercion as a necessary support.
Although the principalsource of sovereignpower is the self-interestof
the subjects, importantconflicts of interestamong subjects, as well as
betweenSovereignand subject, will remainand would be repressedby
force if necessary.Mutualgain in some respectsdoes not precludeconflict in other respects:glory may be a weakermotive, but will remain;
commerceand industrymay increasethe supply of goods, but they remain scarce and men will contend over their distribution.For these
reasons, among others, the need for coercion will never disappear
altogether.
V. Conclusion
Before concludingthis essay, I will make brief comparisonsbetween
Hobbes's view of powerand that of threecontemporarysocial theorists
who describepower and who, like Hobbes, take as their startingpoint
the conceptionof poweras cause. I cannot do justice to these writersin
such brief treatment;my purposeis only to demonstratethe continuing
relevanceof the problemsHobbes raises. One point of view on the concept of poweras cause is representedby RobertDahl3Pand Felix Oppenheim;31a quite differentunderstandingof cause is found in the work of
Steven Lukes.32Each of these schools of thought about power bears
29. For an interestingdiscussionof the concept of "banking"of power, see Barry
Barnes,TheNatureof Power (Urbana:Universityof IllinoisPress, 1988).
30. Dahl, "The Conceptof Power."
31. Felix Oppenheim,Political Concepts:A Reconstruction(Chicago:Universityof
ChicagoPress), 1981.
32. StevenLukes,Power:A Radical View(London:Macmillan,1974).

resemblancesto one side of Hobbes's theory of power: the former to
powerin Hobbes'sstate of nature;the latterto the unidirectional,transitive Sovereignpower of command.
For Dahl and Oppenheim,poweris causality.But one humanbeingis
not necessarilythe cause of everythinganotherhuman being does; the
power relationis not always a unidirectionalrelationof commandand
obedience.Instead,poweris differentiatedinto any numberof different
aspectsor "scopes"; A mightexercisepowerover B in one respectwhile
B has power over A in another. Thus "countervailingpower" and
"checks and balances" are clear possibilities:power may be unidirectional and causal,but only withinone narrowlydefinedscope;withinthe
samesocialor politicalrelationtheremay be otherscopesin whichpower
goes the other way. Therefore,poweris in no sense necessarilydespotic
or oppressive, as would be the case if there were no differentiation
among scopes.
We saw earlierthat powerin Hobbes's state of natureis pluralrather
than causal and transitive:A may dispossess B, but B kills A. Such
pluralismis exactly what Hobbes seeks to change;pluralismof power
leadsto anarchyand civil war. Here, of course,he differsfrom Dahl and
Oppenheim,both of whom believe that power can be plural without
being anarchic.
Steven Lukes, on the other hand, believes there exists in modern
capitalist democraciessomethingakin to the absolute, unidirectional,
causal power of commanddescribedby Hobbes. One must, however,
substitutea bourgeois"powerelite" for Hobbes's Sovereign.Pluralism
is a sham;in fact the rulingclassmanufacturesthe appearanceof consent
by givingthe ruledthe beliefsand desiresit wantsthemto have:"Indeed,
is it not the supremeexerciseof powerto get anotheror othersto have
the desiresyou wantthemto have-that is, to securecomplianceby controlling their thoughts and desires?3 Thereforeit is the case that one
class entirelycontrols another with respect to all importantscopes of
power. Power by definition excludes common interest: "A exercises
powerover B whenA affects B in a mannercontraryto B's interests."34
Thereforeit would follow, thoughLukesdoes not explicitlysay this, that
poweris zero-sum:one's gain is another'sloss. Luke'sown radicalideal
is a social orderin which poweritself is abolished.
The most interestingand importantdifferencebetweenHobbes'sview
33. Ibid., p. 23.

34. Ibid., p. 34. For a similar, though somewhatless one-sidedview of power, see
WilliamE. Connolly, Termsof PoliticalDiscourse(Princeton,NJ: PrincetonUniversity
Press, 1983).
James H. Read
523
of power and that of Lukes concerns the role of common interest. One
might readily equate the internalized fiction of absolute, causal
sovereign power with the false consciousness described by Lukes. In
both cases a unidirectional relation of power and subjection depends on
the subjects believing that their own interests are best served by supporting the ruling authority; neither Hobbes nor Lukes believes that violence
alone is sufficient to establish a ruling power. The type of power characteristic of sovereign command is, as noted earlier, highly artificial; it
requires the active cooperation of those subject to it. But for Hobbes the
subjects' belief that their own interests are best served by the existence of
a sovereign power is an authentic belief; without that belief, sovereign
power could never have been created in the first place. A subject might
later conclude, contrary to Hobbes, that the belief in the necessity of an
absolutely powerful Sovereign was a mistaken one-it could be that the
cure turns out worse than the disease, or that some less harsh cure could
be developed for the same disease-but at any rate the belief originates
with the subjects themselves.
For Lukes, this belief in common interest under bourgeois authority is
a deception, deliberately manufactured for the subjects by the ruling
class itself. But then Lukes has no way of explaining how this structure
of causal power could have come into existence in the first place. The
(false) belief that the authority structure serves one's real interests, on
which the operation of that structure depends, could only have been
created by some previously existing absolute power capable of molding
the passive minds of subjects like clay. Where could this power come
from? The effect would have to become the cause. Lukes does not address this problem.
I return now to the original question: is Hobbes's conception of power
zero-sum, where one's gain necessarily entails an equal loss for another?
The answer is: yes and no-no for natural power, yes for artificial
power. When power is regarded as the capacity to realize some interest-some "apparent good"-it is not the case that one's gain necessarily entails another's loss; everyone, or almost everyone, gains by the
establishment of civil society. Furthermore, that act, at least initially, is
their exercise of power, not something they passively receive. But
Hobbes combines this with a concept of power-as-control in which one's
gain is another's loss.
Therefore, one cannot unambiguously conclude that individuals
become more powerful by subjecting themselves to the authority of
Hobbes's Sovereign, even if he promotes their common interests. The
reason is that it is questionable whether a mutual increase of power can

occurunlessit is consciouslyrecognizedas suchby those involved,unless
it is founded on a concept of individualautonomy.
Hobbes's subjectsrealizetheir interests,but only at the cost of internalizingan interpretationof their own actions which mirrorsthe causal
determinismof nature,a determinismwhich, if it functionedliterallyon
the humanlevel, wouldconstitutethe most completeform of slavery.Of
course this determinismis a fiction. The only reasonwhy the grandfiction of absolute, unidirectional,causal Sovereignpower works at all is
that it servesthe commoninterestsof those subjectto it, who give it their
active support. But strangelyenough, it works because they actively
regardthemselvesas passive. It is as though the left hand did not know
what the right is doing. Power, understoodas the capacity to realize
some "apparentgood," impliesthat one still activelychooseswhatthose
apparentgoods are. No matter how much discretionone retains over
one's own actions in practice, if one has truly transferredto the
Sovereign "my Right of Governingmy selfe' then it is questionable
whether the individual has power at all, no matter how much one
benefits.
This raises an importantquestion:how can one describepower such

that it is compatiblewithnotionsof individualautonomy,andvice versa:
whatnotions of autonomyare compatiblewith the unavoidablefact that
in civil society someoneexercisespowerover someoneelse? Any Robinson Crusoe-likeconceptof autonomy,in whichto be free is to be unaffectedby the powerof othersor, conversely,to be affectedin any way by
another'spower is to be unfree, would effectivelymake it impossibleto
increase power for everyone. Yet neither is it possible to re-educate
humanbeingsso completelythat they experienceeveryexerciseof power
over them as true liberation.Autonomymay be flexiblebut it is not infinitely malleable.
I would suggest that in some respects our practiceis ahead of our
theory.A democraticpoliticalorderin whichthe principleof consenthas
been successfullyincorporatedinto the public and privatespheresis in
fact one in which individualsexercisepower over one another all the
time, though in a mannerrelativelycompatiblewith the power of the
other. A contractis a bilateralexerciseof power;so too is an exchange.
On the more abstractlevel, the contracttheorieswhich serveto justify
democratic political orders could be regarded as attempts to make
governmentalpowercompatiblewith the powerof those over whom it is
exercised.But contracttheoriesrarelyspeakexplicitlyof poweron both
sides; instead, we speak of the power of the state, the liberty of the
citizen,as thoughthe libertyenjoyedby citizenswerenot also a sourceof
power for them.
JamesH. Read 525

We have troubleconceivingof anythingmutuallybeneficialas power.
Traditionhas handed down to us a political languagein which certain
things have been divorced. Those, such as John Rawls and Robert
Nozick, who take contracttheoryseriously,tend to conceiveof contract
as the cessationof the powerof one over anotherratherthan one way in
which power can be expressed;and those who regardcontractsand exchanges as expressionsof power and dismiss social contracttheory as
ideology tend to fall back on a crudenotion of power as exploitation.
This split withinour politicallanguagehas the effect, not only of impoverishingour analysisof presentlyexistinginstitutionsand practices,
but also of limitingour capacityto handlepowerconflictsin the future.
To an ever-increasingdegree,our world is one in whichthe actions and
hencethe powerof one affect in some way the action or capacityfor action of another.The problemscausedby such a high degreeof interdependenceare difficult enoughalready;to continueto conceiveof power
in zero-sumcategories,in termsof unidirectionalcontroland subjection,
will not make solutions any easier.
Hobbes and the Question of

Power
Sandra Field*
the question of power is central to the study of politics. Thomas Hobbes has
been hailed as the author of the greatest political philosophy written in the English
language,1 and indeed as the philosopher of power par excellence.2 Nonetheless, I
argue that conceptualizing political power is a problem for Hobbes. He starts with
a commonsense view that understands the power of individuals as their natural
faculties, and that then envisages these powers being compounded together by
covenant to form the power of a commonwealth. However, I argue that between
his early and late texts,3 Hobbes finds it necessary to modify his account, in three
respects. First, individual power is reconceived as a socially constituted capacity, potentially unrelated to natural faculties; second, human powers are now
understood constantly to form combinations, even without covenant; and third,
a distinction emerges between the causal capacity (potentia) and the authority
(potestas/imperium) of the sovereign, where these had previously been conflated.4
Hobbes wrote his works during a period of political ferment; there will surely
be an illuminating contextual story that can be told to explain his changed view of
political power. However, rather than reconstituting this external historical causality, my argument focuses on the internal conceptual difficulties of the earlier view,
and how they are overcome in the later one. The threefold change in the concept
of political power reflects a changed diagnosis of the problem of politics. It is not
enough to defend a doctrine of the authorized power of the sovereign; such a
Oakeshott, Introduction, viii.

Macpherson, Introduction, 910. For Oakeshott, Hobbess philosophy is, in all its parts, preeminently a philosophy of power (Introduction, xxi).
3
For the purposes of this paper, I consider Hobbess early political works to be The Elements of
Law (1640) and De cive (1642), and his late political works to be Leviathan, both the English (1651)
and Latin (1668) editions.
4
Although in English this distinction is obscured under the single term power, nonetheless I am
able to differentiate between the concepts even in the English texts by comparison of passages, most
directly between the English and Latin Leviathan.
1
2
* Sandra Field is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 52, no. 1 (2014) 6186
[61]
62
journal of the history of philosophy 52:1 January 2014
doctrine must be robustly complemented by an account of how the effective power

commensurate to this authority might be achieved.5 Nor is this straightforward:
for effective political power is not a stable object of possession; rather, it can vary,
sometimes severely. Hobbess Leviathan (L) takes significant steps to correct his
earlier texts preoccupation with power as entitlement and neglect of effective
power.6 In this light, the prevalent juridical7 accounts of Hobbess political philosophy are inadequate.8
1
In this first part of the paper, I reconstruct Hobbess view of power in his early
political works The Elements of Law (EL) and De Cive (DC ), establishing three points
in particular. First, individual human power is conceived as faculties; second, the
only politically salient way in which these powers are combined is via a formal
covenant; and third, the power of the sovereign is the result of such a covenant.
1.1
In his early texts,9 Hobbes frequently uses the term power interchangeably with
faculties.10 A human individuals power is the faculties of body and mind . . . that
is to say, of the body, nutritive, generative, and motive; and of the mind, knowledge
(EL I.8.4).11 This is not implausible: in common usage power means something
like the capacity to do things, and faculties are nothing but the specific capacities
belonging to me by which I can do things. However, Hobbes very promptly moves
on to make a broader use of the term power, extending it to encompass what I
call secondary powers:
5
In an influential paper, Hoekstra explores the sense in which the possession of potentia gives
rise to potestas/imperium; he does not explore the reverse problem, of how potentia adequate to potestas
might be achieved (The De Facto Turn in Hobbess Political Philosophy, 3335).
6
Such neglect is not unique to Hobbess early texts. It is also is evident in contemporary constitutionalism, in the tendency to grasp the power of a particular branch of government or of a church
as that power that it is attributed to it legally, via explicit constitutional provision, to the neglect of the
question of its effective power. The disparity between these terms is particularly stark when the USA
and the UK are juxtaposed: the fact of the establishment of a church in the UK and the explicit antiestablishment principle in the US constitution do not go very far in illuminating the actual ascendency
of religion in politics in the two countries.
7
I use juridical in a general sense to mean concerned with power as authority, not in a more
specific sense to mean concerned with law, positive or otherwise.
8
The dominant interpretation of Hobbess texts understands his doctrine of sovereign power
entirely as a doctrine of authorized power. For instance, Baumgold, Hobbess Political Theory; Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition; Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the
Politics of Cultural Transformation; Martinich, Hobbes; Oakeshott, Introduction; Oakeshott, Hobbes on
Civil Association; Sorell, Hobbes; Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis; Tuck,
Hobbes; Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, His Theory of Obligation; and Watkins, Hobbess System
of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories.
9
For this argument, I focus primarily on The Elements of Law. De cive offers only a compressed
overview of a science of man, deferring full treatment to De homine (Hobbes, On Man; Latin text in
Hobbes and Molesworth, Thom Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera, vol. 2). However, by my periodization, De
homine is a later text (post-Leviathan), and consequently not relevant for establishing Hobbess early view.
10
EL I.1.4; EL I.14.1.
11
De cive states that human nature consists in these faculties (DC, Chapter i, Section 1).
hobbes and the question of power
63
[S]uch farther powers, as by them [the faculties of body and mind] are acquired
(viz.) riches, place of authority, friendship or favour, and good fortune; which last is
really nothing else but the favour of God Almighty. (EL I.8.4)
This extension also remains plausible: many things that I do are done not directly
with my natural faculties, but through the mediation of these secondary powers.
If I have friends or riches, then it will be easier for me to bring about whatever I
want to achieve. But are secondary powers powers in the proper sense?12 I claim
to the contrary, Hobbess analysis of power always privileges natural faculties,
conceiving power as the causal potentiality proper and internal to an individual.
Even if Hobbes recognizes secondary powers to be crucially important in human
life, they are powers only in a derivative sense, as the conduits for or indicators of
faculties.13 I demonstrate this claim by considering Hobbess accounts of equality,
honor, and glory.
If secondary powers are powers in the proper sense, then they must factor into
the assessment of an individuals power. However, to the contrary, when arguing
that people are more or less equal in power, Hobbes does not see it necessary to
demonstrate that peoples secondary powers, such as the assistance and favor they
receive, are equal. Rather, the equality of power is established merely by considering equality in faculties: strength, wit, and knowledge. Correspondingly, the true
measure of any inequality of power that does exist is determined not through
comparison of secondary powers, but through the clash of bodily strength (EL
I.14.15; DC i.34, i.6).
Honor is the internal conception of the superiority of another persons power.14
The signs15 by which power or its excess above that of others can be recognized
are called honorable. They include not only the direct effects of a power, but
also effects at several causal steps away from that power, by which its existence is
indirectly inferred. For instance, general reputation amongst those of the other
sex is honorable as a sign directly consequent of power generative; boldness is
honorable via a more indirect signification: it is a sign consequent of opinion of
our own strength: and that opinion a sign of the strength itself (EL I.8.5). If secondary powers are powers in the proper sense, then their superiority should merit
honor, even without reference to faculties. However, to the contrary, whenever
Hobbes proposes superiority of secondary powers to be honorable, he takes care
12
Numerous commentators take the view that they are; see Goldsmith, Hobbess Science of Politics,
6671; Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault, 2425; Lazzeri, Les racines de la volont
de puissance: le passage de Machiavel Hobbes, 23645; Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, 3546; Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics,
9295; Read, Thomas Hobbes: Power in the State of Nature, Power in Civil Society, 5056; Spragens,
The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes, 11011; and Warrender, The Political Theory of Hobbes:
His Theory of Obligation, 31213.
13
While most of De cive aligns with this analysis, the third theological part does not, aligning more
closely with the analysis of the later texts; contrast, for instance, DC i.23 with DC xv.13.
14
This could be superiority compared to the power of the beholder, but it could equally be superiority compared to the average. For instance, a powerful individual can honor their subordinate
by praising them (EL I.8.6).
15
A sign is a thing that a person has experienced as regularly occurring antecedent or consequent to
something else, which they conjecture will occur in this combination again in the future (EL I.4.910).
64
to trace the chain of signification back to an individuals possession of a faculty.

Riches are honorable, not because they themselves are power, but as signs of the
power that acquired them; authority is honorable, not because it itself is a power,
but because a sign of strength, wisdom, favour or riches by which it is attained
(EL I.8.5). Hobbes does not discuss friendship per se, but he does analyze some
attributes thereof, again reducing them back to faculties: persuasiveness is honorable, as a sign of knowledge; general reputation amongst those of the other sex
is honorable, as a sign of bodily vigor (EL I.8.5).
If secondary powers are powers in the proper sense, then it is not vain to glory
in them. Glory,
or internal gloriation or triumph of the mind, is that passion which proceedeth
from the imagination or conception of our own power, above the power of him that
contendeth with us. (EL I.9.1)
A person has reason to glory when their feeling of superiority of power is grounded
in reality, whereas vainglory is the feeling without the real power. However, Hobbes
directly denies that association with others gives rise to justifiable glory. [N]or
does association with others increase ones reason for glorying in oneself, since
a man is worth as much as he can do without relying on anyone else.16 Similarly,
Hobbes insists that reliance on fame to achieve glory indicates a lack of power
(EL I.9.20). In both cases, the secondary power (association, or the deference and
assistance of those who recognize ones fame) is not by itself reason for glory; in
other words, it is not a power in the proper sense.
Thus, despite the initial presentation of secondary powers as powers in their
own right, they are only incorporated into the analysis insofar as they are reduced
back to natural faculties:17 they are mere conduits for or indicators of the only
things properly called powers, which are natural faculties.18
In what I call the positionality claim, Hobbes asserts that power is intrinsically positional.
And because the power of one man resisteth and hindereth the effects of the power
of another: power simply is no more, but the excess of the power of one above that
of another. For equal powers oppose, destroy one another; and such their opposition
is called contention. (EL I.8.4)
The analytical part of this positionality claim is reiterated and relied upon constantly throughout Hobbess early texts.19 Capacities are only effective in their
Hobbes, On the Citizen, i.2.
There are also other corroborations in the text. First, the definition of secondary powers
such farther powers, as by them are acquired (EL I.8.4)already indicates that for something to be
a secondary power, it is necessary that it should have a connection to faculties. Second, Hobbes says
that power is known by the actions that it produces; he does not countenance that it might be known
directly, as would be the case if secondary powers such as riches and friends were themselves truly
powers in their own right (EL I.8.5).
18
Thus, Tuck is mistaken to claim that in the view of The Elements of Law and De cive, [p]ower is
itself a matter of belief, as is shown by his [Hobbess] discussion of the concepts of glory, false glory
and vainglory (Tuck, Introduction, On the Citizen, xxi).
19
Indeed, the analytical part of the positionality claim also reinforces my argument about secondary
powers. Friendship is one of the key examples of secondary power. If friendship is properly a power,
then it ought to be consistent with the analytical part of the positional claim, according to which if
16
17
65
excess over one another; if you and I race to grab an apple, but I am faster, then
I have the effective capacity to grab the apple. Your capacity, because comparatively inferior, is entirely ineffective. Hobbes elaborates this point in an extended
reflection on the analogy between human life and a race (EL I.9.21). Indeed, his
definitions of glory, honor, and the honorable all involve comparison of power.
However, even if the positionality claim is indisputably analytically central, there
still remains a terminological question. The positionality claim proposes a new
use of the word power. Power is no longer an individuals capacity (whether their
faculties or also their secondary powers), but rather the excess of their capacity
over the capacity of relevant others: for instance, it is the superiority of my strength
that is a power, not the strength itself. The terminological question asks, in these
early texts, is the term power used equivocally for both these meanings, or is it
reserved for one or the other? In fact, the use of the term power to mean noncomparative capacity is clearly dominant in the text. To start, Hobbes frequently
characterizes human power as faculties, not as the comparative excess of faculties
(EL I.1.4, I.8.4, I.14.1). Furthermore, glory and honor are defined in terms of
the comparative excess of power; if power already meant this comparative excess,
Hobbes would need instead to define glory and honor directly in terms of power
(EL I.8.5, I.9.1). Similarly, if power were already comparative, Hobbes should not
speak of a situation of equal forces as a situation in which there is equal power,
but rather no power at all (EL I.14.3). Thus, throughout the text of The Elements of
Law, Hobbes maintains the term power for the faculties: relational comparison
is crucial to understanding the outcomes of human power, but it is not built into
the concept of power itself.
1.2
A social ontology is an account of the kinds of entities that exist in the social
domain.20 The first building block of Hobbess early social ontology is the idea
discussed in section 1.1 that humans are equal in power; a fuller account can be
reconstructed by considering how these equal powers can be combined. Hobbes
distinguishes two possible modes of combination. On the one hand, if a number
of individuals, each retaining their own distinct will, nonetheless coordinate to act
toward a shared end, then this concourse of their wills is called concord, consent
or consensio, forming an association or societas. Their wills are temporarily aligned
but remain distinct (EL I.12.7, I.19.4; DC v.35). On the other hand, if a number
of individuals combine their separate wills through a binding and punitively enforced covenant to form a single collective will, then this is called a union (unio, EL
I.12.8, I.19.6; DC v.67). The exemplar of a union is the political commonwealth.
something is a power, its effectiveness lies in its excess over that of others. Indeed, it is true that if I
have more friends than you, then I can achieve more of my ends. However, consider the relation not
between two enemies who compare the size of their bands of friends, but rather between two friends.
In friendship, two peoples powers combine to generate more effective power rather than cancelling,
contrary to the positional claims requirements. Thus friendship cannot truly be a power. The same
reasoning will apply for any informal association: even if such an association is included on the list of
secondary powers, Hobbess analysis shows them not to be powers in the proper sense of the word.
20
Pettit, Rawlss Political Ontology, 15774.
66
In principle, human collectivities can be either mere associations or proper

unions. However, I argue that mere associations have no political salience in the
early texts. An association may be prompted by the fear of a present invader, or
by the hope of a present conquest, or booty; and endureth as long as that action
endureth (EL I.19.4).21 But it is impossible for such a federation to deliver lasting peace and cooperation, because any unity is rapidly eroded by differences of
purpose and policy or by envy and rivalry.22 To be sure, associations of animals
such as bees can be durable; but unlike animal associations, human associations
are destabilized by passions of resentment and envy, by competition for scarce
goods, and by disagreement on the most prudent way to pursue even ends that
are shared (EL I.19.5; DC v.5).
This dismissal of associations might seem implausible; surely we can think of
many groups which are not commonwealths but which are politically significant.
At the very least, there will be familial groupings that are relatively stable. At one
level, Hobbes accepts this criticism: he admits that his state of nature poses the
idea of humans popping up like mushrooms;23 whereas it is more realistic to
imagine a state of nature inhabited by families with children and masters with
slaves (DC ix). However, Hobbes shows that these allegedly overlooked collectivities themselves have the structure of a union. The canonical way in which a union
comes about is by institution: there is an agreement among individuals to establish
a sovereign over them who represents them as a single will and whom they obey.
However, union can equally be formed by dominion, conquest, or acquisition:
an already mighty individual demands that others agree to submit. In both cases,
agreement is motivated by individuals desire for enduring security, and their fear
of its disruption; but in the former they feel threatened by each other, whereas in
the latter, they fear a conquerors sword (EL I.19.11; DC v.12). The overwhelming
superiority of force of the parent over the child in a family grouping constitutes a
union of this latter sort, even if the agreement is not made explicit. It amounts to
an implicit covenant of submission from the child, and consequently families are
in fact little commonwealths (EL I.14.13, II.3.2, II.4.3, II.4.10; DC ix).
Thus Hobbess social ontology envisages a thoroughly fragmented social sphere,
capable of redemption only through a covenant establishing external unification
in the person of a sovereign. But what is the social ontology of the political order
beneath the sovereign? Hobbes grants there may well be subordinate unions, but
he does not mention associations (EL I.19.9; DC v.10). Associations appear again
to be considered lacking in political salience; this view is particularly evident in
Hobbess treatment of sedition. A seditious group is any union or association that
does not actively recognize the sovereign and its authority, or worse, that denies
it. A discontented multitude can be seditious (EL II.8.2); but they only constitute
a real threat to the sovereign if they have hope of success. Hobbes argues that
this hope requires that they cease being a multitude and structure themselves as a
21
Also EL I.19.6; DC v.4. Hobbes stresses the lack of community among humans in contrast to the
social nature of animals (EL I.19.5; DC v.5).
22
Hobbes, On the Citizen, v.4.
23
Hobbes, On the Citizen, viii.1
67
union, consciously deciding to join together and act by a single will under a leader
(EL II.8.1, II.8.11; DC xii.11, xiii.13). For an informal association is not durable
enough; it will be subject to the same tendency to dissolution as in the state of
nature. The lack of concern with informal groupings is also reflected in Hobbess
strategy for neutralizing the threat to the commonwealth posed by seditious
groups. Hobbes offers rhetorical condemnation of would-be leaders of seditious
unions, belittling their claim to good judgment (EL II.8.1215; DC xii.1013), and
he recommends to the sovereign that it should deploy harsh punitive measures
specifically for the ambitious (EL II.9.7; DC xiii.12). Even though there are other
factors of discontent that conduce to unrest,24 to prevent sedition it is sufficient
simply to undercut the formation of unions by targeting their would-be leaders.
1.3
I now turn to consider the power of the union that is the commonwealth, or what is
the same, the power of the sovereign. A natural persons power is her or his faculties; I argue that we can understand the power of the sovereign in the same way. A
commonwealth is a union, which is characterized by its possession of a single will.
This unity of will allows Hobbes to conceive of the commonwealth as a fictional
(artificial) person (EL I.19.68; DC v.612).25 Just as a natural person (a human
individual) has faculties, Hobbes is happy to attribute faculties to the sovereign.
For the body politic, as it is a fictitious body, so are the faculties and will thereof
fictitious also (EL II.2.4). These faculties are the faculties of the sovereign conceived in its fictional unity; and this fictional unity is constituted by a covenant in
which subjects fully transfer their powers (their faculties). Consequently, the power
of the sovereign, which is its faculties, is the sum of the powers of all its subjects.
For the power [potentia] of the citizens is the power [potentia] of the commonwealth,
that is, his power who holds the sovereignty [summum . . . habet imperium] in the commonwealth. (DC xiii.2)26
The natural faculties of individuals cannot literally be transferred, so instead the

transfer of faculties consists in obedience to the will of the sovereign. But there are
two options for understanding this unification of powers: does the power consist
in the fact that subjects obey (in which case it is in principle variable), or does
it consist in the obligation of the subjects to obey (in which case it is invariant)?
Even though the sovereigns power comes from subjects, the sovereigns power
is not variable.
[G]overnment [imperium] is a capacity [potentia], administration of government
[administratio gubernandi] is an act [actus]. Power [potentia] is equal in every kind of
commonwealth; what differs are the acts, i.e. the motions and actions of the commonwealth. (DC x.16)27
Hobbes recommends some effort to avoid discontent and bad doctrine (EL II.9).
The analogy with the body of a natural person is constantly emphasized. Hobbes speaks of the
body politic (EL I.19.8) and the person civil (EL II.1.1); the Order of The Elements of Law divides
the text into a study of men as persons natural and men as a body politic (EL xiv).
26
Hobbes, On the Citizen, xiii.2.
27
Hobbes, On the Citizen, x.16.
24
25
68
This invariability can be understood in light of the grounding of the conception

of power in the sovereigns nature as an artificial person. The artificial person
is not defined by the degree of cooperation actually achieved; such a reliance
on actual convergence would characterize mere association. An artificial person
has a stronger unity, bound to the juridical structure of covenant that defines it.
Correspondingly, Hobbes consistently talks of the sovereigns power not as the
combined faculties of individuals that it is in fact able to deploy, but as the right
to those capacities: [T]o transfer a mans power and strength, is no more than
to lay by or relinquish his own right of resisting him to whom he so transferreth
it (EL I.19.10). Obedience does not constitute the sovereigns power; but rather
it is an entitlement or something owed to the sovereign in virtue of that power
(EL II.1.7; DC v.11, vi.13).28
However, Hobbes anticipates that this debt will generally be met: he stipulates
the sovereign is actually able to secure the transfer of subjects powers, because
its use of fear is effective in bending their wills.
And though the will of man, being not voluntary, but the beginning of voluntary
actions, is not subject to deliberation and covenant; yet when a man covenanteth to
subject his will to the command of another, he obligeth himself to this, that he resign
his strength and means to him, whom he covenanteth to obey; and hereby, he that is
to command may by use of all their means and strength, be able by terror thereof, to frame
the will of them all to unity and concord amongst themselves (EL I.19.7; my emphasis).29
Hobbes concedes that this bending of wills is not perfect: for he envisages that the
sword of justice will be needed not only to frighten subjects away from disobedience
but also to discipline them when they do disobey (EL II.1.910, II.9.6). Nonetheless, for the most part actual disobedience is presumed not to be too disruptive; it
will be a marginal, foolhardy occurrence, not threatening the civil order.
Thus far I have discussed the sovereigns power in the sense of its potentia.
Power as potentia is a concept shared across the natural and human domains of
Hobbess science, and has a meaning close to causal capacity. But this is not the
only or primary question of political power. Traditionally, when in English one
speaks of the power of a commonwealth, this corresponds to the Latin term
potestas or imperium, which has the overtone of authorized power, or authority.
Indeed, the terms sovereign, sovereignty, and sovereign power are all generally translated as summa potestas, or summum imperium, the highest potestas or
imperium.30 Nonetheless, for Hobbess early texts, this is a distinction that makes
no practical difference.31 The sovereigns potentia is already understood as the
juridical transfer of the potentiae of subjects, and this is simply equated with the
authority power (potestas/imperium) of the sovereign.
28
It is incorrect to consider the potentia of the sovereign in these texts as its actual effectiveness
toward its ends, as do Johnston (The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural
Transformation, 45) and Warrender (The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, His Theory of Obligation, 31213).
29
See also EL II.1.6.
30
Silverthorne, Political Terms in the Latin of Thomas Hobbes, 5068.
31
Silverthorne, Political Terms in the Latin of Thomas Hobbes, 5068.
69
This Authority [Potestas], this Right to give Commands, consists in the fact that each of
the citizens has transferred all his own force and power [suam vim et potentiam] to
that man or Assembly. (DC v.11)32
The sovereigns summum imperium (sovereign authority) is equivalent to its potentia

absoluta (absolute power, DC vi.17).33
2
Throughout his political texts, both early and late, Hobbes aspires to offer a science of politics, that is, to put the study of politics on a sure foundation. In these
texts, scientific understanding is characterized in opposition to mere experience
or prudence, which simply reports what has occurred or what tends to occur.34
Rather, the crucial aspect of science is good definitions (EL I.5.414, I.6.4; L
iv.1213, vii.4). For instance, consider the opening discussion of human nature
in The Elements of Law:
Mans nature is the sum of his natural faculties and powers, as the faculties of nutrition, motion, generation, sense, reason, etc. For these powers we do unanimously
call natural, and are contained in the definition of man, under these words, animal
and rational. (EL I.1.4)
A good definition will contain all and only those properties and powers belonging to a given phenomenon considered in its nature, or in other words, not as an
isolated particular but as an instance of a larger class. Correspondingly, scientific
understanding of a given phenomenon subsumes it under a definition, legitimately
abstracting away from any minor empirical aberrations. To understand a circle
drawn on paper in front of me, it is important that I understand its principle (that
it should be constructed by tracing out points equidistant from a given locus); it
is irrelevant that it may have tiny imperfections in the way it is actually drawn (DC
Epis.5, Pref.9). Thus, a Hobbesian science of man investigates not an individual
humans causal effectiveness per se, but the causality proper to her or him as laid
out in a good definition of her or his nature.35 Nonetheless, there are limits to
this tolerance: science has to have some connection to the reality it purports to
explain. 36 As with the circle drawn on paper, it is permissible for there to be some
small imperfection of the phenomenon compared to its scientific model; but
Hobbes, On the Citizen, v.11.
Hobbes, On the Citizen, vi.27. See also EL I.19.10; DC x.16.
34
EL Epis.xvxvi, I.1.1, I.4.1; DC Epis.49, Pref.4, Pref.9, Pref.18; L, Chapter v, Section 17; L ix.
35
In this respect, Hobbess science is similar to the scholastic method, viewing power as potentiality proper to an individual and belonging to it. Indeed, Brandt demonstrates that Hobbess very
early writings are deeply steeped in the Aristotelian system (Thomas Hobbess Mechanical Conception of
Nature, 17). As Spragens puts it, Hobbess idea patterns paralleled those of Aristotle to an astonishing
degree even as he drastically refashioned their contents (The Politics of Motion: the World of Thomas
Hobbes, 8). More generally, Hobbess science has been characterized as less experimental that that of
his contemporaries: see Anstey, Experimental Versus Speculative Natural Philosophy, 215; Shapin,
Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 7.
36
In Oakeshotts view, [Hobbess] conception of philosophy as the establishment by reasoning
of hypothetical causes saved him from the necessity of observing the caution appropriate to those who
deal with facts and events (Introduction, xiv). However, on my reading this is unjust.
32
33
70
this divergence must remain small if the science is to hold its own.37 I argue that
Hobbess later political view in Leviathan finds the aberrations of social and political reality from the causality of faculties to be significant; understanding power as
faculties misses the overwhelmingly social determination of the human capacity
to achieve ends in the social sphere. This forces a recalibration of his science of
man, his social ontology and his science of the commonwealth.38
2.1
The phenomenon to be explained by the science of man is human behavior; and
in light of the science of commonwealth that builds upon it, we see in particular that the science of man is interested in human social and political behavior.
Leviathan observes that a persons causal effectiveness is primarily constituted by
the aid or forbearance of the informal constellation of people around them. Correspondingly, rather than restrict the ground of individual power to the faculties
internal to that individual, I argue that Leviathan offers a new analysis by which
human power is a socially constituted and potentially shifting property. 39 I make
this argument primarily on the basis of Leviathan chapter x, a recognizable descendent of the analysis of human power in The Elements of Law (EL I.8). The very
close similarity of the two passages has concealed the deep conceptual change
37
I concede that in the scholastic tradition to which Hobbes is indebted (see n. 35), there is one
circumstance under which a scientifically rigorous explanation is exempted from the requirement
to accord with the actual phenomena whose nature is being explained. For Aquinas, most sciences
are theoretical sciences that explain actual phenomena. By contrast, practical sciences do not even
purport to do this; for human nature is fallen and so a science of human nature merely explains how
humans ought to behave. (For a concise characterization of this distinction, see Matheron, Spinoza et
la dcomposition de la politique thomiste: Machiavlisme et utopie, 5154.) However, this exemption
does not apply to Hobbess political works. For in these texts, first, the science of individual human
power is not presented as a science of duty but as a science of real capabilities (see section 1.1). And
second, the divergence at issue in the case of the science of the commonwealth concerns not the
divergence between the model and actually existing commonwealths, but between a commonwealth
established in accord with Hobbess model and Hobbess claim that such a commonwealth will function peacefully (see section 1.3).
38
This has not been noted in existing comparisons of Hobbess texts, such as Schuhmann, Leviathan and De cive, 31; and Tuck, Introduction, Leviathan, xxxviii.
39
Most commentators do not discuss power/potentia at all. The only commentators who detect a
change in the analysis of power/potentia across the texts are Rudolph (Conflict, Egoism and Power in
Hobbes, 7388); Carmichael (C. B. Macphersons Hobbes: a Critique, 361, 36869); and McNeilly
(The Anatomy of Leviathan, 14447).
The following commentators do discuss power/potentia as a generalized effective capacity and
observe its relational grounding; however, they err in not discerning any difference in the account
across Hobbess texts (or in some cases explicitly denying any such difference): Foisneau, Hobbes et la
toute-puissance de Dieu, 20210, 6162; Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on
Ethics and Politics, 13172; Goldsmith, Hobbess Science of Politics, 63, 6671; Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and
Political Theory, 9394; Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et libert : Spinoza critique de Hobbes, 6177, 11821; Lazzeri,
Les racines de la volont de puissance: le passage de Machiavel Hobbes, 23645; Macpherson,
Introduction, 3438; Macpherson, Leviathan Restored: A Reply to Carmichael, 381 (an explicit
denial of any change); Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, 3546;
Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics, 9295; Read, Thomas Hobbes: Power in
the State of Nature, Power in Civil Society, 5056; Spragens, The Politics of Motion: the World of Thomas
Hobbes, 11011; Tuck, The utopianism of Leviathan, 12930; Tuck, Introduction, On the Citizen,
xxi; and Zarka, Hobbes et la pense politique moderne, 12934.
71
from most interpreters; but the closeness of the passages makes the small changes
I identify more significant.40
Where The Elements of Law defined power as faculties (EL I.8.4), Leviathan opens
with a definition of power that enshrines a privilege to effects:
The power [potentia] of a man (to take it universally) is his present means to obtain
some future apparent good. (L x.1)
Secondary powers also find a new definition, supplementing the backward relation
to faculties in The Elements of Law (EL I.8.4) with a forward relation to effects. They
are now called instrumental powers, and are defined as those which, acquired
by these [natural powers] or by fortune, are means and instruments to acquire more
(L x.2; my emphasis). Because the criterion for being counted as a power points
forward to effects, not back to origins, any causal genesis for a power is acceptable: secondary powers are explicitly included in the general definition of power
in equal standing with natural faculties (L x.1).
Are secondary powers still only powers in a derivative sense? To the contrary,
I claim that secondary powers are now genuine powers in their own right, and
this status is not dependent on any connection to natural faculties. The refusal
to privilege faculties and the shift of focus to effects is systematically reflected in
examples. Something is honorable if it is a sign of power. In early and late texts
alike, nobility or good birth are certainly honorable, but in The Elements of Law, it is
by reflection as a sign of power of ancestors (EL I.8.5), whereas in Leviathan it is a
sign that one may easily obtain aid (L x.45). Riches were previously honorable as
signs of the power that acquired them (EL I.8.5); now riches joined with liberality is power, because it procureth friends and servants; without liberality, not so,
because in this case they defend not, but expose men to envy, as a prey (L x.4).
The definition of power is thus conceptually different, but does it have the same
extension? Might it still be the case that human faculties for the most part explain
humans causal efficacy in the social domain? Indeed, according to the account
in the early texts, it so happens that secondary powers are usually only generated
when there are natural faculties underlying them. If this is correct, then there is
no substantive difference between the views, despite the change of definitions.
Against this suggestion, I argue that in Leviathan, Hobbes has come to see that
some of the most important social and political powers rest on interpersonal effects and a near total disconnection from faculties.
Honor is the key mechanism by which an individuals secondary powers are
produced from their faculties. In The Elements of Law, honor is the internal conception of the superiority of another persons power, and it gives rise to certain
characteristic external actions (EL I.8.6). If I think someone else is more powerful
than me, I will tend to defer to her, obey her, and be polite to her. For this reason,
deference, obedience, and politeness are all signs of honor. It is clear that the
deference, obedience, and politeness of others increase the honored individuals
40
The two passages stand in the same place in the text, after the discussion of the passions and
before the establishment of the commonwealth; the internal sequence of the analyses of power are
very similar (starting with natural power, then instrumental powers, then honor); many of the same
examples are used.
72
capacity to achieve her ends, and indeed, this behavior constitutes secondary
power (favor and perhaps friendship) for the honored individual. As I argued, in
The Elements of Law, an individual is truly worthy of honor only to the extent that
she also possess power as a natural faculty. However, the honoring mechanism can
malfunction, meaning that secondary powers can arise in the absence of natural
faculties. If I defer to someone because I believe her to be superior in power, but I
am mistaken in this assessment, my deference is no less real for its faulty grounds.
In the early works, such secondary power grounded in error and not linked to
faculties falls outside the scope of scientific analysis: they can be considered contingent accidents41 that have nothing to do with individual human power. They
are secondary powers but only in a degenerate sense; and they are presumed only
to be a marginal phenomenon.
The crucial question for Leviathan will be whether this kind of power not
grounded in faculties is a central or a marginal phenomenon. It is certainly no
longer definitionally marginal. Honor is redefined as the manifestation of the
value that we set on one anothers power, where value is not absolute, but a thing
dependent on the need and judgment of another (L x.1617).42 This redefinition removes the distinction between proper and degenerate honor, and between
proper and degenerate secondary power. The internal conception motivating the
honoring behavior is no longer susceptible of truth or falsity according to some
common standard; rather, it is a matter of individual judgment. Even if the honorer
values something other than faculties, and even if she is mistaken to think that
the thing she values is truly present, her behavior is still honor and still constitutes
power.43 Furthermore, I argue that this kind of power, where the connection to
faculties is likely or certain to be lacking, is central, not merely definitionally but
also substantively. It is given systematic privilege in Hobbess examples of power;
the connection to faculties is replaced by a connection to the dispositions of other
humans. Reputation is only a tenuous sign of the presence of natural faculties, yet
reputation is power because it draweth with it the adherence of those that need
protection (L x.5).44 Indeed more strongly, reputation is a power even when the
reputation is contrasted to fact:
[W]hat quality soever maketh a man beloved or feared of many, or the reputation of
such a quality, is power. (L x.7; my emphasis)45
Even more strongly again, as is implicit in this quoted passage, the reputation
need not even be reputation of having superior faculties; it could merely be a
41
This is a term from the later De corpore, referring to those effects that are not related to the causality in question (Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy the First Section, Concerning Body, Chapter IX, Section
10; Latin text in Hobbes and Molesworth, Thom Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera, Vol. 1).
42
On this new definition, there is also the change that the characteristic behaviors of placating
and propitiating are no longer signs of honor, but they are honor itself.
43
Strauss observes a change in the relation between honor and power, and specifically the greater
role for power; but he interprets this as Hobbess attempt to hide the humanistic moral basis of his
thought (The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis, 115n2, 169). On my reading, there
is no such subterfuge, simply a change in the understanding of the human capacity to achieve ends,
as I have argued.
44
This is also foreshadowed in De cives theology (DC xv.13), although not in its political doctrine.
45
See also L x.56, 8, 10.
73
reputation of superior secondary power (L x.38). Thus, on the late view, power
arises from a reverberation of appearances and reputations in a network of social
relations: insofar as the power so generated has effects, it has full status as power.
An example is provided by Hobbess own canonical model of the commonwealth. In what sense does the sovereign by institution have the same power to
enforce covenants as a conqueror?46 The sovereign by institution does not possess overwhelmingly superior force as a natural person. However, when soldiers,
guards, judges, executioners, and subjects in general play their commanded roles in
wielding the metaphorical sword of justice and do not thwart its operation, anyone
seeking to disobey will be punished. But why do the soldiers, guards, judges, and
executioners do their part even though the sovereign does not personally have
a sword to compel them? They do so because each of them believes that every
other subject will uphold the command of the sovereign, including wielding its
sword as commanded. This network of belief and compliance is a real power for
the sovereign, no less than the direct superior force of a conqueror (L xvii.13).47
As Hobbes remarks in Behemoth, [T]he power of the mighty hath no foundation
but in the opinion and belief of the people (B 16).
Even if power is often relationally constituted, might there be natural capacities
or faculties that count as powers nonrelationally? To the contrary, exercising any
capacity in a world populated by other people relies on their conduct, perhaps
their aid but at minimum their non-interference. Consequently, in Leviathan all
power is socially constituted. This is not the claim that natural faculties or capacities themselves are always socially constituted. Certainly, many capacities do not
in themselves need to be understood interpersonally: the capacity to speak many
languages, to run a four-minute mile, or to understand the natural world. Rather,
the claim is that if (as I have argued) power in Leviathan is human effectiveness
toward ends, then even a faculty that is not intrinsically social will only count as a
power insofar as it is socially recognized; being dishonored can vitiate the possibility
of any natural faculties serving as a means to future apparent goods. For example,
Hobbes considers science to be a small power, because even though taken by itself
it enormously improves a persons capacity to manipulate the world around her
to her ends, it is not recognized as a power: The sciences are small power, because
not eminent, and therefore not acknowledged in any man (L x.14). It is little
use to the scientist to have a capacity to manipulate nature if the people among
whom the scientist lives and works thwart her activities.48 Superior natural faculties, which might constitute great powers considered in isolated abstraction, are
useless in the real social world against well-developed secondary powers. Indeed,
the distinction between power and mere faculty is marked from the very start of
Leviathans analysis. Natural faculties are said to be power only insofar as they are
L xvii.15.
Such power, though great, can be fragile: if I suspect others are about to shift their allegiance
or otherwise cease upholding the sovereigns power, then I may do so also, so as not to be aligned with
a losing force. See my discussion of sedition in section 2.3.
48
Is this a pointed criticism of Bacons view of scientific knowledge as power? Knowledge may be
power, but it is insignificant in the context of human existence in society.
46
47
74
eminent (L x.2): it is their prominence or conspicuousness that makes them a power,

or in other words, the extent to which they are seen by others to be significant.
In Leviathan, Hobbes defines power in general terms: power is the means to
some future apparent good (L x.1). Barry Hindess complains that goods are
profoundly heterogeneous, and so accordingly are the means to achieve them;
consequently Hobbes should not speak of power as though it could be uniformly
comparable and homogeneous.49 However, attending to the interpersonal context
of human action reveals that neither the means nor ends of power are so heterogeneous as Hindess contends. When Hobbes asserts that there is a perpetual and
restless desire of power after power, the ends for the sake of which the power
is desired should not be understood to be miscellaneous. The desire of power
arises because each cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he
hath present, without the acquisition of more (L xi.2). In other words, although
I may also desire linguistic capacity in case I should want to converse, grain in
case I should want to farm, a lawyer in case I should want to go to court, above
all I want the single thing that allows me to live well now and to be able to satisfy
whatever desires may arise in the future.
But is there a single thing that supplies this general power, a single means to
this general end? My preceding analysis has shown that there is: for humans living in a social world, socially constituted power constitutes a general means to
future apparent goods. Allegiance, having people supporting and assisting me in
my ends, is a general power because the point of allegiance is to serve the ends of
the person to whom allegiance is given, whatever they may be, over an extended
period of time, and thereby gain favor. As Hobbes states, Therefore to have servants is power; to have friends is power; for they are strengths united (L x.3). This
observation illuminates the problem with what I called the positionality claim
of the earlier texts. According to that claim, even if a persons power properly
speaking is her natural faculties, her causal effectiveness lies in the superiority of
her faculties compared to others. Two competitors race for an apple; if I am the
slower runner then I do not get the apple. But speed alone will be the criterion
of success only when the race is a well-regulated competition in which the rules
are respected. Outside of this special case, my slowness may not prevent me from
gaining the apple, for perhaps I have a greater band of friends or supporters willing to help me and obstruct my competitor; or perhaps I have sufficient riches
to buy the apple.50
To be sure, allegiance is not perfectly general in its effects. A band of lawyer
friends does not help in a street fight, nor do streetfighter friends help in court, as
Hobbes readily acknowledges (L x.16). However, this imperfection only becomes
a major phenomenon when considering specific short-term ends. Allegiance is
very close to a general power when it is considered with respect to the enduring
Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault, 2432.

For this reason, I cannot accept Macphersons argument that the relationality at stake in Leviathan
is the same as the positionality of earlier texts (Introduction, 3435); see also Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir
et libert: Spinoza critique de Hobbes, 74n1.
49
50
75
fundamental human end of security and the capacity to pursue future desires
unmolested. To return to Leviathans account of riches, riches do not count as
powers because they can be exchanged for specific goods: for Hobbes states that
riches are only a power when combined with liberality (L x.4). Liberality makes
no difference to the capacity to carry out direct exchanges, but it does make a
difference for allegiance. People desiring to advance or protect their own general
power will give the possessor of riches their allegiance insofar as they hope to
receive whatever unspecified assistance they may require from those riches in the
future. Liberality gives rise to this hope; illiberality quashes it (L x.4).
It is always possible to restrict ones analysis to consider faculties or capacities in
artificial isolation and to abstract away from this looser social context of allegiance:
one can always consider the scientist apart from the mob, the race competitors
apart from their supporters. This was the procedure of the early texts. But if the
phenomenon to be explained under the rubric of power is human effectiveness,
and if, as Leviathans account proposes, allegiance is the central determinant of
this effectiveness, then such abstraction vitiates the analysis of power. On this new
account, power is neither natural faculties nor any other attribute that could be
neatly accommodated as a possession of the individual: human power lies fundamentally in relations.51 In contrast to De Cive and The Elements of Law, Leviathan
finds an individuals human nature and power to lie outside of her or him, both
physically and conceptually, in her or his potentially shifting and relational social
context.52 Allegiance becomes the fundamental constituent of power: as such, an
individuals power may well fluctuate in ways beyond her control.
2.2
Hobbess new conception of power marks not merely a semantic or definitional
change: to the contrary, I now argue that it gives rise to a substantively different
social ontology. Where the discussion of power in The Elements of Law stressed
the tendency of humans to isolation and fragmentation unless they are brought
together in a formal union, now Leviathans discussion of power brings to the fore
an opposite phenomenon. Humans have a constant tendency to form associations,
some of which are politically significant even though they are not bound into a
union. I argue that in Leviathans new social ontology, Hobbes envisages an active
social domain from which groupings constantly emerge apart from any process
of covenant, and in which inequalities are constantly generated.53
51
A similar argument is offered by Rudolph. Rudolph argues that from The Elements of Law to
Leviathan, Hobbes moves from understanding appetite as a biological attribute to understanding it
as socially constituted; correspondingly a move from understanding power as a drive to power as an
acquired characteristic (Conflict, Egoism and Power in Hobbes, 7388; The Microfoundations of
Hobbess Political Theory, 3452).
52
Against Oakeshott, who claims that Leviathans science takes the human individual in isolation
(Hobbes on Civil Association, 3234). Foisneau documents another respect in which Leviathans social
theory moves to a more relational analysis: a change from justice understood in Aristotelian terms as
commutative or distributive, and injustice as tort, to justice understood as determined by a market,
injustice as breach of covenant (Foisneau, Leviathans Theory of Justice, 105).
53
The new social ontology has only occasionally been noted. The work of Tarlton and Frost is truly
an exception in this respect; see Tarlton, The Creation and Maintenance of Government: a Neglected
76
There is a curious difference in Leviathans account of the state of nature

compared to the earlier texts. Hobbes still asserts that there is a rough equality
among humans. However, this equality is not (as previously) established simply by
appeal to the rough similarity of natural faculties. To the contrary, some people
are manifestly stronger than others. Despite this difference of strength, Hobbes
claims that equality of power may be achieved by the weak confederating to counter
the strong (L xiii.1).54 This suggests that associations are politically salient, and
raises the question, might there also be associations that increase inequality rather
than eliminating it?55 Does this variation of wording truly point towards a changed
social ontology? The possibility that there is no real difference is suggested by
Hobbess reiteration of his view from The Elements of Law and De Cive that informal
associations are so fragile as to be politically inadequate. In Leviathan, Hobbes
reasserts that humans lack community compared with animals (L xvii.612), and
that people in an informal association
can expect thereby no defence, nor protection, neither against a common enemy,
nor against the injuries of one another. For being distracted in opinions concerning the best use and application of their strength, they do not help, but hinder one
another, and reduce their strength by mutual opposition to nothing; whereby they
are easily, not only subdued by a very few that agree together, but also when there is
no common enemy, they make war upon each other, for their particular interests.
For if we could suppose a great multitude of men to consent in the observation of
justice and other laws of nature without a common power to keep them all in awe, we
might as well suppose all mankind to do the same; and then there neither would be,
nor need to be, any civil government or commonwealth at all, because there would
be peace without subjection. (L xvii.4)56
I concede that for Hobbes, humans desire security to last all the time of their
life, and this requires a formal commonwealth; any temporary association around
specific momentary purposes does not serve this purpose (L xvii.5). However, I
Dimension of Hobbess Leviathan, 30727; and Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 13172. Even those who appreciate the interpersonal character of Hobbess
later conception of power tend to attribute to him a consistent social ontology of power as fragmented
and isolated. (See notably Macpherson, Introduction, 5556; Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza
and His Contemporaries, 90103.) Macpherson complains that Hobbes does not anticipate the formation of cohesive classes, and that he focuses too much on centrifugal forces rather than centripetal
ones (Introduction, 5556; see also Leviathan Restored: A Reply to Carmichael, 38385). But in
this section, although I concede Hobbes does not consider class formations, I argue that Leviathan (L
x) is very interested in centripetal forces. (In this vein, see Carmichael, Reply: Macpherson Versus
the Text of Leviathan, 391.)
54
Tarlton, The Creation and Maintenance of Government: A Neglected Dimension of Hobbess
Leviathan, 311. It is common in the literature to miss this distinction, and still to claim equality of
power in the state of nature. See for instance Martinich, Hobbes, 26; Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on
Language, Mind, and Politics, 1012; and Read, Thomas Hobbes: Power in the State of Nature, Power
in Civil Society, 514.
55
Hobbes should perhaps have seen this problem for equality even in his earlier texts: for he
acknowledges that there are families in the state of nature, and different sized families will have different power (EL II.4.2). However, Hobbes does not make any indication there of being aware of the
problem, perhaps because of his methodological abstraction to individuals considered like mushrooms
(Hobbes, On the Citizen, viii.1).
56
In a similar vein, Hobbes characterizes life in the state of nature as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short (L xiii.9; my emphasis).
77
claim that Leviathan explores a new option for association that lies between a momentary association motivated by specific goals and a formal union for the sake of
permanent security. This association oriented toward mid-range goals comes about
in a new fashion, which correspondingly endows it with the possibility of durability and political salience, even if not the supreme security of a permanent union.
Leviathans account of power gives systematically more emphasis to informal
associations. In The Elements of Law, the positionality claim pits individual against
individual, and the only salient possibility of human coalition is a formal union
via covenant, a topic deferred to later in the book (EL I.8.4). By contrast, in
the corresponding point in the text of Leviathan, Hobbes replaces the focus on
fragmentation with aggregation.57 Hobbes asserts that the greatest human power
is strengths united (L x.3); although one example of strengths united is a
commonwealth united by sovereign covenant, he also explicitly countenances a
compound of powers depending on the will of each particular, as for example
friendship. That is, the greatest of human powers is achieved not only by a formal
union bound by a permanent covenant into a single will; rather, it can also be
achieved in an informal association where wills remain separate.58
In earlier texts, associations were formed by separate individuals agreement
on specific shared ends. Correspondingly, whether because those ends were superseded or because of other differences or passions, the associations tended to
collapse.59 Leviathan by contrast envisages an alternative and anthropologically
more deeply rooted basis for association. As I argued in section 2.1, individuals
perpetually seek power by taking care to placate and propitiate (to honor) those
whom they speculate could harm or assist their own ends. They seek to ally themselves in such a way as to advance and protect their ability to live securely and
pursue their more specific ends. However, this very same behavior has an effect
that is not necessarily intended either by those honoring or those honored: it
constitutes patronage networks, security blocs, gangs of followers, and allegiance
groups. In other words, the desire for power leads to the spontaneous formation
of associations, superseding the rough equality of individuals with the inequality
of more or less mighty groupings.60 For instance, recall that riches are a power
insofar as they garner allegiance.61 When multiple individuals offer their allegiance
to the possessor of riches, an association is constituted.
57
Both McNeilly and Carmichael observe the account of The Elements of Law envisages universal
opposition of powers, whereas Leviathan envisages limited opposition, including the possibility of
friendship groupings (Carmichael, Macphersons Hobbes: A Critique, 361, 36869; McNeilly, The
Anatomy of Leviathan, 14447). Most other commentators consider Leviathans social ontology to be
fragmented and isolated; see for instance Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 5879;
Oakeshott, Introduction, xxxivxxxv; and Read, Thomas Hobbes: Power in the State of Nature,
Power in Civil Society, 514.
58
In the Latin edition, the greatest (maxima) power is the formal union of wills: a federation where
wills remain separate is said to be second in power (proxima). Nonetheless, the point of the English
edition still holds: an informal union is a considerable power. Indeed, by contrast in the earlier texts,
it was not even possible to attribute a single potentia to an association.
59
See section 1.2.
60
L x.59, x.20, x.38, x.45. Hobbes adds other more specific tendencies relevant to formation of
allegiance in his chapter on manners (L xi.45, x.7, x.1618, x.27).
61
See section 2.1.
78
Furthermore, these associations of allegiance have greater durability than associations for specific ends. The motivating desire of clients in these associations
is not tied to transient specific goals, but to the perpetual goal of advancing and
protecting their own general power. By consequence, the association so formed
is potentially capable of motivating behavior over an extended period of time.
Consider now the factors that destabilize associations even among those with durably shared goals, notably envy and disagreement. These do not arise so acutely
in spontaneous associations of allegiance and patronage. If I envy my partner in
a cooperative enterprise and covet her goods, it may be impossible to continue
cooperating; by contrast if I envy the wealth of my patron and covet her goods, I
am likely nonetheless to continue to be her client in hope receiving some benefit
(L x.19, x.23). If I disagree with my patrons decisions but still hope to be favored
by her, then I have a strong reason to put my disagreement aside (L x.28, x.30).
These kinds of association are not merely potentially stable, but they are also
potentially very great powers. The Elements of Law asserts the positionality claim:
powers cancel out each others effects. At the corresponding point in Leviathan,
Hobbes notes the opposite phenomenon, of accumulation and increase: For the
nature of power is in this point like to fame, increasing as it proceeds; or like the
motion of heavy bodies, which, the further they go, make still the more haste (L
x.2). The mechanism of this self-increase is social. Allegiance is not only a power in
itself, but it is also a sign of power. As a sign of power, it attracts honor, very likely
in the form of more allegiance. X has a lot of friends, so I want to be her friend;
y has henchmen, so I do not want to annoy her; I heard that people plan to back
z, so I back z too: in all cases the reputation of holding many peoples allegiance
leads to ever more people placating and propitiating, or in other words, to a bigger and more solid social grouping (L x.38).
To be sure, I am not claiming that these associations have a guaranteed stability.
The very nature of their constitution carries a deep risk of instability: if my reason
for offering my allegiance to a powerful individual or organization is my perception of her power and the likelihood of my benefiting from it, then should that
perception change, I will withdraw my allegiance. Worse, given that my estimation
of that power may be largely based on the evidence I see of others opinion of that
power, if ever I suspect that others are shifting their allegiance, I will be quick to
do the same. But the fact that these associations may be unstable does not prevent
them from existing, and under many circumstances proving quite durable. One
example that Hobbes considers at length is religious association. Religion can
give rise to durable social compounds that do not rely on sovereignty or punitive
covenant, although they may subsequently be captured politically (L xii.12, 19,
20, 21, 24).62 Further examples are seditious associations, and even the power
of the sovereign itself, as I will show in section 2.3. These associations break the
former equality of power: on the new social ontology, we see a much more uneven
texture of social life. Individuals are no longer largely equal in power: some have
the allegiance and support of more people than others.
This anthropology of religious association was entirely lacking in the earlier texts.
62
79
2.3
In his early texts, Hobbes presumes that the sovereigns punitive incentive will be
sufficient to render subjects obedient, and to bring its effective power to meet
the power to which it is entitled. In this section, I argue this picture comes under
pressure in his later civil science. For the changed social ontology envisages a social
sphere much less amenable to decisive unification, and consequently forces a potentially much greater gulf between the sovereigns entitled capacity and its effective
capacity. I argue that in Leviathan Hobbes addresses this problem by developing
a dual science of politics.63 Potentia now refers only to the sovereigns effective
capacity and does not purport to illuminate entitled capacity; entitled capacity
or authority is now considered separately under the heading of the sovereigns
potestas or imperium.64 To be sure, the science of potestas is dominant in Hobbess
works,65 explaining commentators neglect of his science of potentia.66 However,
the development of a distinct science of potentia corresponds to a new understanding of the problem of politics. The challenge for the political philosopher is not
merely to establish a science of entitled power elaborated through a doctrine of
right blithely assuming that effective power will readily follow; it is also necessary
63
I concede that Hobbess explicit taxonomies of science do not list these separately (L ix).
However, in Leviathan the two concepts are given distinct systematic treatment, unlike the early texts
where they were conflated. Malcolm argues that Hobbes equivocates between understanding cause as
the consequences of names and as the consequences of facts; correspondingly he offers two sciences
of man confused together (Malcolm, Hobbess Science of Politics and His Theory of Science, Aspects
of Hobbes, 155). Against this view, I do not find confusion in Hobbess texts; rather, I agree with Matheron in finding two complementary analyses (Spinoza et la dcomposition de la politique thomiste:
Machiavlisme et utopie, 77).
64
In this light, it is a mistake to characterize Hobbes as the exemplary opponent of constituent
power, as do Montag (Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries, 9295) and Kalyvas (Popular
Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power, 22344). It is also an error to use analysis of De
cives Latin as a guide for the terminology in Leviathan, as Silverthorne does (Political Terms in the
Latin of Thomas Hobbes, 5068).
65
Especially in De cive, which lacks the elements of the larger system of science of the powers of
bodies.
66
Many commentators simply neglect Hobbess account of the sovereigns capacity, attributing
to Hobbes only a juridical science of potestas (only a science of what ought to occur), for instance:
Martinich, Hobbes, 4353; Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics, 11540;
Spragens, The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes, 11224, 15158; and Tuck, Hobbes, 6476.
However, there are several commentators who supplement their account of Hobbess juridical science with a direct denial that he has a science of effective power. These include Goldsmith, Hobbess
Science of Politics, 93214, especially 176; Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault, 3539;
Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, 70, 122,
215; Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries, 90103; Oakeshott, Introduction,
xxviixxix; Read, Thomas Hobbes: Power in the State of Nature, Power in Civil Society, 51420;
Sorell, Hobbes, 821; and Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis, 5978, 169.
Rational-choice readers of Hobbes also only offer an account of authority. Kavka (Hobbesian moral and
political theory, xiii, 1920) reconstructs Hobbess descriptive theory of politics, as an account of what
ideally rational agents would do. He then faults Hobbes for not giving an account of irrationality in
his descriptive theory (438). But as I will argue, Leviathans account of the sovereigns capacity power
offers just such a descriptive theory; Kavkas theory lies closer to the entitled capacity theory, which is
what subjects would do if they always had sufficient rationality to obey. (See also Hampton, Hobbes and
the Social Contract Tradition, 17388.)
80
to understand the real determinants of effective power as systematically and precisely as possible, in order to bring that effective power to coincide with right.67
Hobbess civil science seeks to explain the establishment and maintenance of
peace and security. If the sovereign has power in accord with its entitlement (that
is, if there is obedience), peace is achieved. If there is disobedience, the sovereign
has less capacity than that to which it is entitled. Should there be a great deal of
disobedience, the civil order degenerates into anarchy and war. Nonetheless, in
the early texts civil science takes the form of a science of the sovereigns power
(potentia) as a fictional person: an analysis of potentia as sovereigns faculties (its
entitled capacities from subjects), and not its effective capacity. Hobbes does not
offer any systematic account of the sovereigns effective capacity insofar as that
may diverge from the capacities to which it is entitled. This is acceptable, because
Hobbes claims that the sovereign will in fact have effective capacity commensurate
to its right. First, he anticipates that in the face of the punitive incentive, subjects
will generally hand over their power to the sovereign in accord with its right.68
Second, the threats to the sovereigns power are easily identified and controlled.
The social order is understood as one of flat, fragmented equality of power among
subjects, with no individual having sufficient power to challenge the sovereign. The
only way in which the sovereign order is threatened is when subjects deliberately
form a faction for the purpose of overthrowing the sovereign. Correspondingly, the
commonwealth is secure so long as it can prevent the formation of such unions.69
Thus although the science of the sovereigns potentia provides an account of
sovereigns entitlement to rather than its achievement of obedience, divergence
between these two will not be too grave.
In the view of the later text, Leviathan, there is a different and much graver
threat to the commonwealth.70 It is posed by groupings that are mere associations,
not unions, and that are not formed with seditious intent, but that simply emerge
according to the spontaneous dynamics of the pursuit of power outlined in section
2.2. Hobbes shows a new and persistent concern with eminent individuals, the
immoderate greatness of towns, and the accumulation of treasure by monopolies
or farms (L xxii.3132, xxvii, xxix.19, xxix.21). The presence and perpetual emergence of informal associations is newly recognized in Leviathan as a political fact
to be dealt with, even though such associations fail in Hobbess view to provide a
tenable alternative to sovereign rule. This concern is further developed in Behemoth,
in which the wealth, influence, and popular support of religious groupings and
great towns are identified as the matrix of Englands descent into civil war (B 34).
67
Frosts analysis (with which I am otherwise sympathetic) is hampered by presuming a single
unified use of the English term power, and not observing its correspondence to the systematic Latin
distinction between potentia and potestas. She gives an excellent account of power as capacity, but
presumes this also directly accounts for the sovereigns authority or rightful power; see Lessons from a
Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 13172.
68
As I argued in section 1.3.
69
As I argued in section 1.2.
70
Johnston also finds a change in the sovereigns vulnerability: he argues the sovereign finds
itself more sensitive to opinion (The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural
Transformation, 7880).
81
There are two reasons why these groups pose a problem, even though they are
not formed for the sake of sedition. First, they provide means for sedition, if the
intent does arise. In the early texts, the means of sedition are only secured after
an active decision to form a faction for the purpose of sedition. In Leviathan, the
means (power blocs not dependent on the sovereigns pleasure) are always being
generated, even without any seditious intent. Thus, should an ambitious individual
develop seditious plans, they may already have at their disposal the means to put
these plans into action; it will be that much more difficult for the sovereign to
arrest these plans.
[P]opularity of a potent subject (unless the commonwealth has very good caution of
his fidelity) is a dangerous disease, because the people (which should receive their
motion from the authority of the sovereign), by the flattery and by the reputation of
an ambitious man, are drawn away from their obedience to the laws, to follow a man
of whose virtues and designs they have no knowledge. (L xxix.20)
The second reason why these groups are dangerous to the sovereign is even more
serious. The existence of other powers within the social order in itself means the
sovereign has less effective capacity. Powerful subjects tend to engage in the commonplace pursuit of advantage; they do not in general have the intent to seize
power or to destroy the civil order, but they do want to have things their way. In
particular, they think they ought not be punished, and hope to escape punishment.
And that such as have multitude of potent kindred, and popular men, that have gained
reputation amongst the multitude, take courage to violate the laws from a hope of
oppressing the power to whom it belongeth to put them in execution. (L xxvii.15)
The sovereign knows that when it wants to issue or enforce some command that is
inconvenient to the powerful subject, it cannot presume it will secure obedience
from that subject, and perhaps not from the subjects supporters either. For the
powerful subject and her or his followers have the power simply not to comply.
They may comply in some cases, they may limit their reaction to noncompliance, or
they may be provoked into hostile retaliation to teach the sovereign not to trespass
on their concerns. This is vividly illustrated by King Charles Is abortive attempts
to impose the Book of Common Prayer on Scotland and to demand Ship Money
(B 2830, 3637). In all cases, the sovereigns power is weakened. It cannot simply
ignore the fact of powerful subjects in society and make no concessions to them,
because any successful display of disobedience publicizes the subjects power and
gains her or him even more allegiance. For this reason, crime from presumption
of strength giving impunity is much more politically pernicious than the everyday
crime from hope of not being discovered (L xxvii.30).
However, no alternative response from the sovereign is clearly better. For if the
sovereign acknowledges the limits on its own effective power, it is drawn into a game
of appeasement, which can only end badly. The sovereign may bestow benefits
on a subject (whether exempting from punishment or making policy to please)
for fear of some power and ability he hath to do hurt to the commonwealth
(L xxviii.25). Such benefits are extorted by fear and are in this sense sacrifices
that the sovereign makes for the appeasing of the discontent of him he thinks
more potent than himself (L xxviii.25). However, this strategy does not encour-
82
age obedience; quite the opposite, it encourages increased extortion, as Charles

I found after his attempts to appease the Scots and parliament backfired71 (B
7576, 97102, 115). For achieving the deference of the sovereign makes visible
the subjects power, garnering more allegiance. Seeing the sovereigns weakness
emboldens others to press for concessions too. This may defer civil war, yet the
danger grows still the greater, and the public ruin is more assured (L xxx.24).
The lesson from this analysis is a dispiriting one. Power groups, once established, cannot necessarily be eviscerated without negative consequences. Instead,
powerful subjects need to be cut down before their influence grows (L xxx.24).
The problem is that this will be very difficult to achieve. First, Hobbes says subjects
should be prevented from honoring fellow subjects, for this would constitute unequal powers not subject to the control of the sovereign (L xxx.8). But almost all
social conduct has a valence as honor or dishonor, and so it will be impossible to
eliminate honor entirely (L x.1936). Second, functionally, not all power differences can be suppressed. The commander of the army needs to be popular to do
his job, even though this is a danger to the sovereign (L xxx.28). Hobbes suggests
that the sovereign can minimize the danger from the popularity of a subject by
itself being popular (L xxx.29). But it is not clear how to become popular if that
status is not already secured; for as already discussed, granting benefits extorted
by fear is a highly dangerous political strategy, and pandering to the people does
just this (L xxviii.25).
Thus, the new social ontology shows that the sovereign will face a constant need
to maintain its power in the face of spontaneously emergent powers in the populace; such powers are a threat even when they have no seditious intent.72 While a
sovereign can take measures to try to deflate and level out such powers, this will be
an ongoing task for which success is uncertain. The result is that it is a challenge
for the sovereign to achieve actual effective capacity commensurate to its entitlement; peace is not so easily or definitively achieved as it was in the earlier texts.
The sovereigns entitled power and effective power may diverge; this would
be a problem for Hobbess science of the sovereigns power as capacity (potentia)
if it still attempted, as in the early texts, to illuminate the sovereigns effective capacity to secure peace by laying out the sovereigns fictional faculties (its entitled
capacity). Now in Leviathan, there is an obvious alternative strategy. For the new
concept of individual human power (potentia) as effective capacity can immediately
be extended to the sovereign. On the new account of individual human power,
obedience is itself a prime constituent of power, rather than simply a recognition
of a power (faculties) that exists independently as I argued in section 2.1. Whenever one individual obeys anothers command, she gives power to the one she
obeys (L x.20). To extend this analysis to the sovereign, all that is required is to
consider the sovereign commander as just another person being obeyed, rather
than in its fictional juridical nature. In this case, the potentia of the sovereign is a
To be sure, Hobbes says the parliament also actively desired to usurp sovereignty.
I concede that De cive already displays an incipient worry with emergent powers even when they
are not deliberately for the purpose of sedition (DC x.7). However, De cive awkwardly analyses this still
in the language of formal unions, which is unconvincing for examples such as popularity and wealth
(DC xiii.13).
71
72
83
variable property: the capacity that it exercises through whatever actual obedience
of subjects it is able to garner.
To be sure, there is a difference between the sovereign and any other figure
that finds itself obeyed. For the sovereign is entitled to the obedience of subjects
(L xvii.1314). Even if in fact its potentia is limited by a disobedient populace, it is
entitled to have the greater potentia that would correspond to their obedience.73
Indeed, Hobbes understands the sovereigns behavior in appeasing powerful subjects as its behavior qua natural individual; this is contrasted with its power as the
person of the commonwealth, by which it is entitled to obedience (L xxviii.25).
The sovereign is so entitled not only because obedience has been promised to it
through covenant, but also more importantly because natural law stipulates that
such a covenant is needed for peace (L xiv.45). Indeed, the early science of the
sovereigns power as a science of entitlement is retained, but now under heading
of potestas/imperium. It is still very important to get this correct: Hobbes places first
in his list of causes of the dissolution of the commonwealth the sovereign resting
content with less power [potestas] than to the peace and defence of the commonwealth is
necessarily required (L xxix.3).
The transformation of Hobbess treatment of power has far-reaching consequences for his science of politics. Juridical arguments may generate an account
of right and authority, but a cursory appeal to punitive incentives is insufficient
to establish the possibility that political order under such a juridical model could
stably exist. Where De Cive asserts that all commonwealths alike possess a stable
potentia that is equated with their imperium, now the corresponding passage in Leviathan raises the concern that despite its stable potestas, a commonwealth might
suffer a diminished potentia (DC x.16, L xix.4). In the later texts, establishing the
correct doctrine of juridical potestas/imperium now needs to be distinguished from
and supplemented by a difficult and quite separate analysis of how the concretely
causal potentia to which the sovereign is entitled is to be achieved and sustained.
Effective power is no longer conceived as a stable possession but as a variable and
relationally constituted effective capacity. This transformed conception of power
illuminates the domain of lived politics below the neat categories of the juridical
sphere, promising to offer a better understanding of actual dynamics of political
stability, and what threatens it.74
note on hobbess texts

Where possible, I have avoided using the Molesworth English Works / Opera Latina
editions of Hobbess writings, given the inadequacies of those texts. (See discussion
in Warrender, Editors Introduction, v, 34; Tuck, Introduction, On the Citizen,
xlviii; Curley, Introduction to Hobbes Leviathan, lxxi.)
73
I stress, contra Frost (see n. 67) that authority or entitled power (potestas) does not collapse into
effective power (potentia). It is true, as Hoekstra shows (The De Facto Turn in Hobbess Political Philosophy, 3335), that sufficient effective power grants sovereign authority (imperium/summa potestas)
and insufficient effective power removes it. However, so long as effective power does not fluctuate
below a certain threshold, the authority or entitled power of the sovereign remains stable.
74
I gratefully acknowledge support for this research from the Stafford Fund of the Princeton
University Department of Politics, and from an American Political Science Association Travel Grant.
84
Although Hobbess language is gendered, his conceptual analysis is to a remarkable degree ungendered, particularly by comparison with other canonical figures
from the history of political thought (for instance, consider Hobbess refusal to
naturalize the authority of men over women [L, chapter xx, sections 45]). Correspondingly, while for the sake of exegetical clarity I make some concession to
the original Hobbesian terminology (for instance, retaining science of man), otherwise I will frequently reformulate Hobbess arguments in gender neutral terms.
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Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy

Vol. 13, Nos. 23, JuneSeptember 2010, 417433
The significance of Hobbess conception of power

John Dunn*
Kings College, Cambridge, UK
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JohnDunn
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Social and Political Philosophy
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 Hobbess 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.
Keywords: power; right; danger; Hobbes
Agenda
What Hobbes thought about power was interesting, complicated, quite hard
to understand, and in the long run exceedingly important. That much, probably, is common ground amongst modern interpreters of Hobbess views,
whether they think him wildly and scandalously mistaken, and profoundly
pernicious in his impact precisely because of his errors, or deeply and
dismayingly accurate in his fundamental assessment of the human condition
and what it practically implies (cf. Arendt 1946 at one end of the continuum,
through Leo Strauss 1936, 1950, 1953, to Carl Schmitt 1996, pp. 83107, esp.
88, 90, 95). Still more so, no doubt, if they vacillate irresolutely between the
two assessments, finding it impossible to position themselves solidly beyond
the reach of either.
Many elements have entered by now into the scale and scope of these
disagreements. To locate their sources and track their effects would require
an exploration of much of the subsequent history of western political thinking
(cf. on a far smaller scale Malcolm 2002, pp. 457545). Only after such a
tracing could we be reasonably confident of seeing steadily which is the more
accurate view of Hobbes himself (let alone of the human condition which he
*Email: jmd24@cam.ac.uk
ISSN 1369-8230 print/ISSN 1743-8772 online
2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13698231003787844
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418
J. Dunn
sought to diagnose). My purpose here is altogether more modest. It is to raise

a simple question.
It is conventional to suppose that Hobbes held relatively distinctive views
about power in at least three respects: a distinctive conception of what power
is, a distinctive conception of human nature and of the causal role of power
in orientating and motivating human beings, and a distinctive conception of
politics, centring on the implications for the terms on which humans must
interact of both of the former views. Any ambitious interpreter of Hobbess
views (including at least at some points in his life Hobbes himself) needs to
consider how far these elements compose a single coherent and consistent
structure in which the last element, Hobbess conception of politics, issues
logically from the first two. It seems reasonably clear that Hobbess own attitude towards the relation between these three conceptions varied over time
(Skinner 1996, pp. 426437), and there is no inherent reason to prioritize one
historical phase in its variation over another. What remains of fundamental
importance is whether the shifts in attitude reflect changes in persuasive
strategy, themselves driven by more immediate and contextual political
experience, or whether they reflect transformations in ultimate conviction.
What power is
Just how did Thomas Hobbes think about power? The question itself is
simple enough, but it scarcely permits a quick, clear and accurate answer.
Power played several very different roles in organizing Hobbess thinking,
and in imparting force to his writing. In the first place, it was a peculiarly
potent term in his vocabulary; and, since his operating vocabulary included
Latin as well as English, it is important to register that the English term power
as used by him conveyed two quite distinct Latin terms potestas and
potentia, the first of which was predominantly political in sense a matter of
rights or authority while the second was predominantly physical or causal
in sense a matter of fact (see very helpfully Foisneau 1992).
Hobbes attempted with some energy to think of power as what made the
universe as a whole work just as it does. He contrasted power in that sense,
power as the medium of natural causation, with power in the sense of entitlement to act, though in one portentous instance, that of the Deity, he believed
(or at any rate apparently asserted) that the two could and did coincide
perfectly. He also set himself with extraordinary determination to bring the
two modes of thinking precisely and securely together.
You can see the prospective importance of the contrast between them if
you consider the translation by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne of
Chapter V, Section 11 of the original Latin text of Hobbess first published
writing on politics, De cive (Hobbes 1998, pp. 73f). I give the translation
itself at length, citing the Latin phrases as and where they help to clarify what
is going on. In every commonwealth, the Man or Assembly to whose will
419
individuals have subjected their will is said to hold SOVEREIGN

AUTHORITY (SUMMAM POTESTATEM) or SOVEREIGN POWER
(SUMMUM IMPERIUM) or DOMINION (DOMINIUM). This Authority
(Potestas), this Right to give Commands, consists in the fact that each of the
citizens has transferred all his own force and power (potentia) to that man or
Assembly. To have done this simply means (since no one can literally transfer his force to another) that he has given up his right to resist.
Hobbess theory of politics was a theory principally about potestas the
relations between rights and authority and about how human agents have
good reason to act. But what gives it its startling impact is his continuing
awareness throughout of the aspect of human beings through which alone
they can do anything at all: through what equips them to be agents, their
potentia or force, their capacity to change the world in accordance with their
own purposes.
We know that Hobbes had been thinking hard about human psychology
and the material relations which underlie it since at least 1635, since he tells
us so himself in a letter of that year (Malcolm 2002, p. 34). We also know
that he spent considerably more time, from the later 1630s until he returned
to England from exile, working on science and metaphysics than he did in
writing about politics. In the Elements of law itself he had done his best to
base his political principles on an account of human psychology that was, as
Noel Malcolm says, compatible with (although not necessarily dependent
on) his mechanistic physics (Malcolm 2002, p. 15). There is every reason to
believe that he retained this hope and intellectual purpose when he eventually
came, in 1655, to publish De corpore, the most extended account we have of
his overall view of scientific causation. Even at this point he had scarcely
contrived to reconcile the two different models of scientific method the
knowledge of causes and the knowledge of definitional meanings which, as
Malcolm says, jostled for position against one another in his thinking
(Malcolm 2002, p. 22).
Chapter X of De corpore, Of power and act, presents his fullest picture
of the constituents of the universe, its internal structuring (Hobbes 1962,
p. 121), and the two methods of philosophy: one from the generation of
things to their possible effects; and the other from their effects or appearances
to some possible generation of the same (Hobbes 1962, ch. XXV, p. 145). It
begins by equating power and cause, and analyses all causation through the
conjunction of active and passive power. But it casts no light whatever on
how Hobbes saw these two models as articulating with one another. Causation requires plenary power: the union of active and passive power, which
alone renders action possible (Hobbes 1962, p. 122). It is a nice point quite
what this implies for Hobbess conception of what he called liberty and
necessity, and what most philosophers still call free will. But it is clear
enough that Hobbes meant it to carry no particular implications for his
conception of politics.
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J. Dunn
Besides this prominent and potentially equivocal role within his vocabulary, power was also for Hobbes at least two other things: an endlessly
evocative image (Alexander 1971) within his notably dramatic imagination,
and a key theoretical conception (or perhaps two different but equally key
theoretical conceptions) within his remarkably intense struggle to systematize
an understanding of human life and its place within the rather evidently nonhuman universe in which that life must be lived.
The idea of power formed the core of his sense of what human life is
really like; it also furnished a foundation for his conception of what human
beings, like all other components of that universe, in the end consist in. It thus
bridged, precariously but nonetheless persistently, the subjective and the
objective, the view from within and the view from nowhere, what Bernard
Williams called an absolute conception of reality (Williams 1978), and the
most explicitly anthropocentric (human-centred and so human-relative)
elements of that reality (cf., plausibly, Baumgold 2003, esp. p. 170). How
exactly did this bridge work? How was the join effected? That question has
teased Hobbess cleverest interpreters from his day to ours. It seems reasonable today to presume that in the end it cannot really have worked that there
must have been a definite hiatus between the two, if indeed the relation was
anything more than a pun on the meaning of a word, a simple equivocation.
Even over the question of how Hobbes himself saw it as working, how he
perceived the conjunction, the ablest modern commentators, including his
endlessly patient and acute biographer Noel Malcolm, have yet to hit upon a
wholly convincing answer.
If you suppose that this presumed bridge between the objective and
subjective elements in Hobbess thought cannot really have spanned the
chasm, why should it be of the faintest continuing importance why Hobbes
himself believed it to do so? We can be certain that for Hobbes himself that
belief mattered greatly, not least because he chose to lavish such a large part
of his relatively abundant stock of free time in pressing forward the lines of
geometrical and scientific inquiry, designed to search out and capture the
properties of that painstakingly objectified universe. But why should it matter
in the least to us that it mattered so much to him? Why is it not a purely
contingent fact about the highly idiosyncratic preoccupations of someone
who died a very long time ago?
There are at least two reasons why it still has a pressing claim on our
attention. One is the impact of Hobbess imagination on the imaginations of
other human beings who have lived later: the length of the shadow which he
has cast, and its intimate continuing presence within our own imaginations,
whether we notice it or not, and its impress, however unawares, on how we
now see and feel: perhaps even on what we ourselves now are. The other,
more elusively, lies in the singular (perhaps even unique) force of his
conception of one very specific element within human life, the place of
politics in making that life practicable at all on any continuing scale, but also
421
placing it endlessly in jeopardy. Hobbes had both a remarkable vision of what

human life is really like, and a profound (if in some respects highly implausible) conception of what politics is, of why there is any such thing as politics,
and of why the activity or predicament of politics is the way it is, and not
completely different, and very much more prepossessing and reassuring than
it ever turns out to be.
To see that power plays a very special role in Hobbess conception of
what human life is like, and register the sheer force of that conception within
our own imaginations consider what he says in his early work The elements
of law about the Passions of the Mind (Hobbes 1999, chap. IX, pp. 5060;
one of the principal grounds for the long-standing misjudgement that Hobbes
presumed an egoist psychology throughout his works: Gert 1967, cf.
McNeilly 1966, Baumgold 2003, pp. 170f). Amongst those passions, Hobbes
mentions and analyses here glory or pride, humility, shame, courage, anger,
revengefulness, repentance, hope, trust, pity, indignation, emulation, laughter
(very strikingly), weeping, lust, love, charity, admiration, curiosity, magnanimity and pusillanimity. Most of these passions, on his account, turn on or
consist in relations of power. Glory, for example, proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our own power, above the power of him that
contesteth with us (p. 50). Its opposite, humility, comes out as a state of
generalized fear of alien power: the passion which utterly cows a man that
he neither dare speak publicly, nor expect good success in any action (p. 51).
Lust is not a merely sensual pleasure but also a pleasure or joy of the mind,
consisting in the imagination of the power they have so much to please
(p. 55). Even charity moves men as it does because There can be no greater
argument to a man of his own power, than to find himself able, not only to
accomplish his own desires, but also to assist other men in theirs (p. 56). If
you have made yourself fantastically rich by your own efforts (with a discreet
leavening of those of others), if you happen to be Bill Gates or Warren
Buffett, or even George Soros, what greater pleasure could there be than to
do just that?
All conception of future is conception of power able to produce
something: whosoever therefore expecteth pleasure to come, must conceive
some power in himself by which the same may be attained (p. 48). The
passions themselves consist in conception of the future, that is to say, in
conception of power past, and the act to come. The power in question is the
faculties of mind and body, And besides those, such farther powers, as by
them are acquired (viz.) riches, place of authority, friendship or favour, and
good fortune: which last is really nothing else but the favour of God Almighty
And because the power of one man resisteth and hindereth the effects of
the power of another; power simply is no more, but the excess of the power
of one above that of another (p. 48). All power for Hobbes, then, is relational. It forms a fluid and constantly changing medium, through which and
through which alone, all humans must always think about and judge how they
422
J. Dunn
can hope to get what they want, and struggle for the opportunity to get it. Of
course Hobbes well knew that they can and often do think and judge in many
quite other ways, of an altogether less focused and self-aware kind. But insofar as they did, he was quite confident, they must be doing so deludedly and
inefficaciously, except by pure accident. Insofar as it could become selftransparent, and insofar as it could be lived reasonably, human life could only
take the form of a ceaseless quest for power.
Hence the force of the metaphor of life as a race we must suppose to have
no other goal, nor no other garland, but being foremost. And in it
To endeavour is appetite.
To be remiss is sensuality.
To consider them behind is glory.
To consider them before is humility.
To lose ground with looking back vain glory.
To be holden, hatred.
To turn back, repentance.
To be in breath, hope.
To be weary despair.
To endeavour to overtake the next, emulation.
To supplant or overthrow, envy.
To resolve to break through a stop foreseen courage.
To break through a sudden stop anger.
To break through with ease, magnanimity.
To lose ground by little hindrances, pusillanimity.
To fall on the sudden is disposition to weep.
To see another fall, disposition to laugh.
To see one out-gone whom we would not is pity.
To see one out-go we would not, is indignation.
To hold fast by another is to love.
To carry him on that so holdeth, is charity.
To hurt ones-self for haste is shame.
Continually to be out-gone is misery.
Continually to out-go the next before is felicity.
And to foresake the course is to die. (pp. 5960)
Think of the Tour de France, and then think of that race as all of human
life. The celebrated passage from Leviathan in 1651 shows us the implications of that conclusion even more clearly. It shows us why that race is bound
to prove even more gruelling than the Tour de France itself, since, unlike the
latter for most of its participants, it has no living end. It goes on as long as we
do, and when it stops, we stop with it (Hobbes 1991, p. 70). Felicity is not an
ultimate end or highest good, but
a continuall progresse of the desire from one object to another; and the attaining
of the former, being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is, That
the object of mans desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of
time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desires.
423
So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And
the cause of this is not alwayes that a man hopes for more intensive delight,
than he has already attained to; nor that he cannot be content with a moderate
power; but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which
he hath present, without the acquisition of more.
Hobbes mentions, immediately and prominently, the malign impact of

that psychological mechanism on the motivation and conduct of ruling
monarchs, especially operating beyond their own sovereign territories: And
hence it is, that Kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the
assuring it at home by Lawes, or abroad by Wars: and when that is done, there
succeedeth a new Desire (Hobbes 1991, p. 70). Much subsequent political
thought has been devoted to the effort to devise and implement institutions
for furnishing other sorts of political leader (presidents, prime ministers and
so on) with reliably less perverse incentives as yet, alas, with highly
imperfect success. You do not need to think that Hobbes reached convincing
conclusions to recognize that he often saw a very long way into the practical
challenges of politics.
Hobbess understanding of power still matters, not just because of the
scale of its impact on our own imaginations its sheer cultural impetus up to
the present day but also, and quite separately, because his conception of
politics still matters. In that respect not merely has it as a matter of fact deeply
affected how we do think and feel; it also should now affect (and perhaps
affect more rather than less than it has thus far done) how we think, and
therefore how we should and will feel, about politics (whether or not it should
also have as deep an impact on how we think and feel about human life itself).
But on the matter of how we conceive what politics is, and how we would be
well advised to try to cope with it, there is good reason for confidence in the
continuing prudential force of Hobbess viewpoint seen, not as he hoped it
would be judged, as a proven theorem of practical rationality, but just as a
markedly more instructive caricature of the human political predicament than
any other writer before or since has had the insight to discern or the draughtsmanship to delineate.
The desire for power, in Hobbess account, is the most inclusive of human
desires: more basic, for example, than riches, knowledge, or honour, the three
very different western secular answers to the question of what lifes goal
really is the answers suggested by and embodied in capitalism, in classical
philosophy, and in feudal social relations. It is more basic than any of these
answers, because although each of these very different modes of life suggests
a quite different content, it alone gives the common form for every one of
those contents. Riches, Knowledge and Honour are but severall sorts of
Power (Hobbes 1991, p. 53).
You might think that it was at any rate less basic than at least one other
possible contender within Hobbess thought, the preservation of life itself.
424
J. Dunn
But this Hobbes quite explicitly denies. Self-preservation is the most basic of
human rights: the one right which can never be fully alienated. But it is not
more basic than the restless desire of power after power, because that desire
is precisely what there is to preserve. Even the humblest never give up that
insatiable quest. They just become too paralysed by fear to act on their
desires. Only the dead give up the quest; and they give it up, not in order to
pursue something else, but because, as my mother pointed out to me dryly on
her deathbed, they are no longer there. To foresake the course is to die
(Hobbes 1991, p. 60).
The Power of a Man, Hobbes tells us at the beginning of Chapter X of
Leviathan, is his present means to obtain some future apparent Good (1991,
p. 62). For the man in question it is thus defined in part by whatever does
happen to appear good to him (cf. Malcolm 2002, p. 442). But it is also
defined, of course, by the efficacy of the means which happen to be available
to him. Note, again, the presence of both the subjective and the objective
elements, the person-relative and the wholly impersonal. And the value or
worth of a man, what subjectively must motivate him to find available means,
is objectively simply his Price, that is to say, so much as would be given for
the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute: but a thing dependent
on the need and judgment of another And, as in other things, so in men,
not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price (p. 63). Power is an
exhausting quarry to pursue because it can never be captured; but its relativity
makes it also an unnerving preoccupation. Sometimes it accumulates under
its own momentum, like Fame, increasing as it proceeds, or like the motion
of heavy bodies, which the farther they go, make still the more hast (p. 62).
But it can also deflate, apparently under just the same momentum. Nothing
succeeds like success; but nothing, too, can fail quite like failure. Hobbess
picture of what life is like is not a comforting one, and it leaves out a good
deal. But there is something eerily persuasive about it.
Is that eerie persuasiveness a reflection of its epistemically irresistible
realism, or of Hobbess spectacular talent for rhetorical manipulation of his
readers, or does it issue instead from its suggestive, if inadvertent, instability
of perspective, its constant and not wholly self-transparent oscillation
between the subjective and the objective? That oscillation may well be
disastrous for Hobbess own constructive intellectual ambitions; but it may
have interesting implications for those who can read him now, and use their
reading of him to think through for themselves quite how to see the settings
of their own lives.
Hobbes himself certainly claims something very different from this. Not
only does he insist, in De cive as elsewhere (Hobbes 1998, II, 1, p. 32), that
The method of starting with definitions and avoiding equivocation is of
course the proper method for those who leave no opportunity for counterargument. He continues to insist, nine years later in the Review and
conclusions to Leviathan, that as to the Whole Doctrine, I see not yet, but
425
the Principles of it are true and proper; and the Ratiocination solid. For I
ground the Civill Right of Soveraigns, and both the Duty and Liberty of
Subjects, upon the known naturall Inclinations of Mankind, and upon the
Articles of the Law of Nature; of which no man, that pretends but reason
enough to govern his private family, ought to be ignorant (Hobbes 1991,
p. 489). His purpose in writing it was to set before mens eyes the mutuall
Relation between Protection and Obedience; of which the condition of
Humane Nature, and the Laws Divine, (both Naturall and Positive) require
an inviolable observation (p. 489). His confidence in the validity of his
argument and the overwhelming importance of his message did not extend to
the expectation (particularly by 1651) that the solidity of the reasoning
would win general applause, or elicit universal conviction. Unlike his natural
philosophy, which he did expect would attract his readers, if he could only
complete its publication, For such Truth, as opposeth no mans profit, nor
pleasure, is to all men welcome (p. 491), he was very well aware that his
political argument threatened the interests and clashed with the tastes of far
too many of his contemporaries for most of them to welcome it with the
slightest warmth.
That argument is one about right, not about fact or the causal structure of
the universe: about the civil right of sovereigns and the duty and liberty of
subjects. Its key conclusion, as noted, is that men must inviolably observe the
mutual relation between protection and obedience. If and where they find
themselves protected, they have no defensible option but to obey. This tells
them little about what to do wherever they find themselves far from protected,
in downtown Monrovia or for that matter Nablus, or Tel Aviv, or Baghdad.
It is a highly incomplete guide on how to act in face of political chaos. What
it tells them is simply that, if and where they are lucky enough to find themselves confronted by political order, they should accept that order and defend
it to the best of their ability. Within the scope over which it did apply, within
the space of effective protection, this is an extreme doctrine and was clearly
intended to be so. What it did was to remove, within that space, all topics of
disagreement from the political arena, and thus remove politics (agreement
and disagreement about what to do publicly and together) along with it.
Hobbess greatest intellectual enemy was Aristotle; and what he held against
Aristotle was not just the latters, as it seemed to him, archaic conception of
what the universe consisted in and why it operated as it did, his outdated view
of the subject matter of the science of nature, but at least as much the prominent role which Aristotle assigned to serious public evaluative disagreement
in his picture of how human beings should try to live with one another. For
Aristotle, since the opportunity to judge together what is good, and then do
your best to realise that good in a life with others, is the main point of living
with others, any such concession was not just reckless and unjustified. It
involved a deliberate abandonment of the main purpose of human life on any
scale larger than a family. But for Hobbes, all such disagreement was always
426
J. Dunn
on sufferance from the holders of political authority. They might sanction or

forbid it exactly as they judged best; and no one else had any rightful say in
the matter.
The picture of life as a race, and above all as a race from which you cannot
escape by any means other than death, was both scandalous and disconcerting. It was scandalous because it clashed so directly with virtually all prior
interpretations of the requirements of the Christian religion (and, for that
matter, of any other of the great world religions) because it insisted on the
inescapability of preoccupations which were strongly disrecommended by the
principal precepts of that religion, and espoused a picture of how humans are
compelled to orientate themselves and act which seemed flatly incompatible
with the injunction to live the whole of their lives in the light of the life to
come the new life which could begin only when life on earth had already
come to its end. Hobbess picture of the race of life, from a Christian point of
view, presented its course as running in quite the wrong direction: in no sense
towards Heaven, and in a spirit which effectively ignored the potential
hazards of Hell.
Hobbess own religious views have remained acutely controversial ever
since he began to make his philosophical views public in print (see, recently,
Curley 1996, Martinich 1996). For a number of reasons it is still an extremely
delicate historical judgment exactly what they were. Part of the reason for this
obscurity is the strong practical incentives which Hobbes had to exaggerate
their orthodoxy, in face of the urgent and potentially lethal danger of prosecution for heresy (Hobbes 1993, Malcolm 2002), and the understandable
reluctance of his very grand patrons, from Charles II and the Earls of
Devonshire downwards, to be associated with such conspicuously offensive
opinions. Part of the reason, however, was Hobbess own all too apparent zest
for the scandalous as such, and the literary flair with which he conveyed that
zest to his stunned readers. For some purposes the interpretation of these
views is quite important. It affects, certainly, how we should see the precise
architecture of his political theory, and perhaps even how far we should judge
that theory a success or failure in its own terms. But to grasp how exactly
Hobbes thought about power, why his thinking about power has had such
lasting vitality, and what conclusions to draw about how it is or is not wise to
think about power now, the content of Hobbess own religious beliefs is
essentially beside the point. And since the historical judgment itself is such a
difficult one, it is prudent and honourable to ignore it here.
What is clear about the conception of life as a race is that it fits one of the
three main secular western candidates for lifes goal considerably better than
the other two. There has been some interesting historical disagreement about
how neatly it really fits with the model of a society shaped around the requirements for a capitalist economy, with a Canadian political theorist, the late
C.B. Macpherson (1962), still the most trenchant defender of the precision of
the fit, and the Oxford historian Keith Thomas, perhaps the subtlest sceptic
427
over its precision (1965). But there are several evident respects in which it
conspicuously fails to fit the model of a feudal society, a social order in which
it is firmly presumed that the great bulk of its members should know their
place, and conscientiously refrain from jostling their betters. And no one
could readily miss its disparity from the answers suggested by classical
philosophy, whether Stoic, Aristotelian or Platonic.
The key implication of viewing life as a race is the dominant role it
assigns to competition in structuring anyones life the imperative and
compulsion to view your own life always in relation to and at odds with the
lives of others, and not either as an exercise in internal self-fashioning or
modification, or in external cooperation and more or less extended friendship.
It is not that Hobbes disrecommends cooperating with others, or being a true
friend, or even achieving a high degree of self-control (any more than he
disrecommends the same styles of conduct on the part of states towards one
another: Malcolm 2002, ch. 13). It is simply that the force of his recommendations of what all his contemporaries would have agreed to be good
behaviour is pretty feeble when set beside the overwhelming impact of his
portrayal of incessant and intensely motivated competitiveness. It is also fair
to say that this rather prominent contrast in imaginative impact is matched by
the comparatively thin rational grounding which Hobbes was able to provide
(or at any rate, chose to offer) for the styles of personal conduct which he did
approve.
Hobbes, then, did not urge his readers to be obsessively competitive. He
merely assumed that they were obsessively competitive, could not readily
cease to be so, and could be induced to recognize that they were so themselves, and that they needed to reckon with the practical consequences of
virtually everyone else who had any effect on their lives also proving to be so.
Obsessive competitiveness in oneself might seem at worst a regrettable
personal pathology. But in others it was also plainly a very serious hazard: a
source of clear and present danger, to say nothing of vaguer and even more
imponderable dangers in the middle distance. Hobbess picture of politics
centred on that source of danger, and on the very practical challenge of keeping it within bounds. The Laws of Nature, which both summarize how men
should behave, and indicate how, why, and under what conditions they can
have good reason to behave as they should, seek to bridge this diagnosis, as
it figures within an individual as seen from their own point of view, and as it
features in all other individuals who affect them, when these are viewed by
them firmly from the outside. These laws purport to express a consistent and
impartial viewpoint, which will not simply collapse in its motivational force
when exposed to the partial motivation of every actual human agent. Whether
or not that is a coherent intellectual hope is an extremely old question, no
closer to being settled now than it was in the fourth century BC. (It was still,
for example, the elusive prize of the entire intellectual lives of two remarkable philosophers, who died quite recently John Rawls [1972, 2006] and
428
J. Dunn
Bernard Williams [1993, 2006].) Hobbess attempt to construct that bridge

was one of the most spectacular projects in modern intellectual history; and
the idea of power, what it is in and for human beings, and what it means to
them, provided a large part of the materials out of which he volunteered to
construct it.
Hobbess conception of politics certainly centred on the obsessive
competitiveness of human beings. But it had, unsurprisingly, many other
components, not all of which articulate as directly with his own understanding of power, or perhaps with any understanding of power which it could be
natural for us now to entertain on our own behalf. Three particular components are worth underlining. One is the acute vulnerability of human beings;
not merely their rather evident mortality, but their initial incapacity even to
keep themselves alive, and their relative frailty in the face of cold, wet,
disease, other animals, and most of all one another. The second is their
strongly ingrained disposition to judge for themselves, and relinquish their
judgments, even under duress, with the utmost reluctance. The third, very
famously, is their all but universal capacity, sooner or later, on their own or
in concert with others, to take one anothers lives (a consideration which
Americans as much as anyone have good reason at present to take with
extreme seriousness). Almost all readers have found something shocking
about that last insistence; but many of them have been less than clear-headed
in identifying what it is that they are recoiling from.
Hobbes certainly did not view his fellow human beings as universally
murderous. He was a cheerful and charming companion, who had no
difficulty in making and keeping friends. Perhaps understandably, it does not
seem to have crossed his mind to view himself as covertly murderous. What
he thought was not that all of them were permanently disposed to kill one
another; but that, if and when they did happen to be so disposed, there would
for almost any of them (any not completely paralysed and voiceless) be
circumstances sooner or later in which they could. Human mortality and
frailty are hard to miss; and no conception of politics could readily occlude
their practical importance (though some, of course, have made quite an effort
to do so). But in themselves human mortality and frailty are quite politically
plastic, compatible with, and perhaps even suggestive of, widely divergent
political attitudes and approaches. Put together with the near universality of
the human capacity to kill, they do not obviously narrow or stabilize in
political implications; but they increase sharply in urgency.
If you put all three together mortality, frailty, and what you might call
lethality, the capacity to kill and then add to them the axiom of compulsive
competitiveness, you can see readily enough why self-preservation seemed
for Hobbes both such a dominant and such a formidably elusive goal. The
State of Nature is so alarming because it foregrounds this problem and offers
no practical facilities for resolving it. To resolve it, human beings must leave
the State of Nature by substituting effective protection by others for the
429
necessarily ineffectual struggle to preserve themselves by means of nothing

but their own powers. If they could effect this substitution, they would indeed
be profoundly unreasonable to choose not to; so unreasonable that it would in
general be extremely unlikely that they would choose not to that they would
deliberately spurn lasting security in favour of extreme and permanent peril.
What is in doubt is how far and how they can justifiably hope to effect the
substitution. Hobbes is not confused or dishonest enough to promise them
that they can reach full and lasting security. All he claims for his solution is
that they can reach a decisively higher and more durable degree of security
by transferring their right to judge how best to preserve themselves, and their
own power which backs that right, to a single judge with a vastly augmented
power: the Sovereign. This leaves them no better off if the Sovereign proves
incapable of protecting them, and in deep trouble if he or she proves indifferent to the task of preserving them, let alone actively hostile towards them. But
they were in deep trouble to start off with; and it in no way weakens their
right to defend themselves as best they can against any Sovereign that does
prove hostile towards them.
This was not the way in which almost any of Hobbess contemporaries
viewed or thought about their own relations with authority; and most of us
still find it a pretty bleak way in which to do so. But it is remarkably clearheaded; and, even now, it is far from obvious that there is any better way in
which to think about those relations.
What does it imply for how we should think of power? Firstly, that it is
above all the salience of power in shaping the continuing purposes of every
human individual which sets the problem of politics in the first place.
Secondly, that that salience, taken with human mortality, frailty and lethality,
constrains the degree to which that problem can be solved. Thirdly, that
political order is a prior need to any other goods of political life, to just the
degree to which that order succeeds in preserving and protecting all those
subject to it. Sovereignty, as the best but necessarily partial solution to the
problem of politics, systematizes, integrates and stabilizes a public power.
But it leaves intact the internal dynamic of power-pursuit which drives every
individual human agent; and it wrestles, endlessly and with very limited
success, to tame and channel the restless, endlessly labile surges of power
which draw humans together into active groupings with more or less elaborated pretensions to establish or extend their control over other groupings
(Hobbes 1969).
One plausible picture of politics at any time and place is as a more or less
intense and confused struggle for power between a great many participants,
aligned for or against one another in a great many different ways. In that
sense Hobbes himself certainly did not believe that either power itself, or the
struggle to secure it, could be eliminated from the life of any human grouping. What he thought was that that struggle could be kept within acceptable
bounds in just one way: by establishing a single clear structure of authority,
430
J. Dunn
a single definite site of judgment, and an integrated and effective apparatus

of enforcement. This was what Hobbes himself at the time in due course came
to call a state (Skinner 1989, Hobbes 1991), and the world since has come to
call so after him. Sovereignty, a systematization of power, was the remedy for
the inherently centrifugal and anti-systematic impact of the pursuit of power
by human groups, a way of fixing its intense lability, and averting the ghastly
dangers which that lability carries for every human society. This is a very
pessimistic picture, perhaps most disconcerting for us in its insistence that
power is at its most labile, and therefore most menacing, in the unconstrained
and incontinent public expression of belief and judgment. Whatever else is
unclear about Hobbess political theory (and continuing disagreements
amongst his interpreters show it to have been drastically less clear than
Hobbes cheerily supposed), no reader could doubt that he was a dedicated
enemy to any conception of a right to free public expression.
The Sovereign had the right and responsibility to decide the content of
religious doctrine and the forms of religious worship. It had the right and
responsibility to decide what may or may not be said in public, let alone
printed and sold to others (a matter of real concern for Hobbes himself, many
of whose books were banned for most of his remaining life, shortly after
their initial publication, in Holland, in England, and no doubt elsewhere).
Universities, one of Hobbess least favourite institutions, had the duty and
responsibility to teach that the Sovereign held that right, and to explain why
the Sovereign held it. In practice, Hobbes blandly noted, that responsibility
could helpfully be interpreted as meaning that the universities should settle
down to teach his own doctrines, opinions and judgments to all their pupils
(Hobbes 1969).
Hobbess remedy for the ravages wreaked by power was the construction
of a far deeper, far more coherent, and far more effective structure of power,
with the overarching right (the potestas), the peremptory duty, but also the
overwhelming weight of force to end those ravages for ever. You can see the
point of that remedy clearly still, if you call to mind the experiences of all too
many areas of the world over quite long periods of time, or feel the weight of
global shame in the terrible images from Baghdad and remember the century
and more that has led up to them. The state is still the sole remedy we have
for those ravages. (And where not your own state then invariably someone
elses.) But everywhere by now the state is bound to be as much part of the
actually existing problems as it can possibly be of any effective solution to
them. There are still numerous universities in Baghdad. But even if there are,
what good would it do at present for any of them to teach Hobbess doctrines,
however clearly and eloquently, to every one of their students?
Where most of us today dissent sharply from Hobbess judgments, whatever else we may happen to believe, is in seeing his remedy for the instability
and disruptiveness of power in politics as not only extraordinarily unlikely to
prove effective, but also as being almost as bad as the threat which it
431
promises to avert. We see the trade-off between effectiveness and cost as

overwhelmingly unpalatable; and we simply do not believe that there are not
other, at least equally effective, and far less distasteful, remedies to hand.
That judgment may not always prove right say in Baghdad today; but it can
scarcely be claimed to have proved consistently wrong everywhere ever since
1651.
Hobbess portrait of the place of power within politics suggests a much
better question than it does answers. What it shows unforgettably is that
whether or not that question forces itself on our attention (whether or not we
have the wit to recognize it), it will always require an answer. You can see it
in a number of different ways; but it remains in substance exactly the same
question. What can we do, what shall we do, what must we do, to be reasonably safe? As safe as we ever could be, as safe as we now can be, safe till the
race is over, and there is nothing left to preserve.
Whatever its other merits, we need not (and should not) agree with
Hobbes that the answer to that question in itself can ever tell us what to do.
Not only is it never conclusively directive; what it suggests may also always
be deeply dishonourable (Dworkin 2006, ch. 2, esp. p. 51), whether or not it
also destabilizes itself in application and ends up aggravating a peril in which
we already stand. How we decide to trade dishonour off against security in
face of that peril is one of the most momentous choices now facing many
western countries, a fresh form of a very old challenge. There is every chance
in face of it that we will end up erring in both directions simultaneously:
weakening our sense of public shame, and swelling the ranks of our dedicated
enemies through exactly the same decisions.
Conclusion?
How, in the end, is it right to see the ways in which Hobbes thought about
power and its role in structuring human life? Did he see the perpetual and
restless desire for it, as Arendt assumed (1946), as an internal impulse or
personal disposition (a property of every individual human being as such)?
Was his conception of that role essentially psychological: intrinsic to the individual human animal (cf. Malcolm 2002, p. 442)? Or was it, as Malcolm
insists (p. 442), not psychological at all but merely analytic, and its role in
organizing human life, to define a predicament generated and constituted by
the external relations between human individuals, and by doing so suggest (or
even enforce) an inescapable response to it on their part in just the same way
as any other perceived feature or aspect of the material world? Does it serve
simply to define a situational hazard for which there can and should be an
effective institutional remedy?
Either way would render the outcome dire; but the first makes it harder to
see how the predicament could have any effective remedy. Since Hobbes
offered his own doctrine as just such a remedy (at least in Leviathan and
432
J. Dunn
Behemoth), it is inherently unlikely that he did see the matter quite that way,
especially in the later stages of his intellectual life. Like Schmitt after him
(1996), Hobbes unmistakably viewed mans political condition as a predicament, and the main source of that predicament as the dangers which humans
pose to one another and the enmity which arises from those dangers. Neither
construes human political life through a generalized human propensity for
enmity. Both view the human prevalence of enmity principally as a product
of perceived dangers, real or imaginary. What marks Schmitt out from
Hobbes is his perspective on our response to those dangers: the identification
and choice of enemy and friend. For Schmitt, locating ones enemies in the
face of danger is always partly a process of choice, and inherently linked to
finding and choosing ones friends. For Hobbes the propensity to choose
friends is itself a source of danger (almost as dangerous as beliefs themselves), both irremediably inchoate and endlessly disturbing of judgment.
Any hope of safety lies in the painfully artificial stabilization of judgment,
undisturbed by particular passions, around a power sufficient to secure it.
Wherever it is urgently needed (Baghdad this month), this seems a lot to hope
for. One of the two, plainly, was an overwhelmingly more powerful and
original thinker than the other (as well as an altogether more admirable man).
But each nevertheless perhaps saw something which the other in some
measure missed.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the helpful responses to earlier versions of the text from Johan
Tralau and Stephen Holmes, and for the kind and extensive aid of Deborah Baumgold
in revising it.
Notes on contributor
John Dunn studied history at Cambridge and Harvard. He is a Fellow of Kings
College and Professor of Political Theory in Cambridge. His books include The
political thought of John Locke (1969), The politics of socialism (1984), Locke
(1984), The history of political theory (1996), and Setting the people free (2005).
He has been a visiting professor in Ghana, India, Japan, Canada, Italy, and the
United States (Tulane, the University of Minnesota, Yale). He is a Fellow of the
British Academy, chaired its Political Studies Section from 19941997 and served
on its Council from 20042007. He is also Foreign Honorary Member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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THE MYTH OF POWER: HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN
Richard W. Alexander,
The
idea that most

build
metaphor,
strange.1
For
some
scientists,
philosophers,
create
"models,"
now
years
The Evergreen
and social theorists

is
"myths,"
commentators
State College
no
on Hobbes
longer
have
employ
new
or
pointed
out that in Leviathan Hobbes created a powerful and widely influential

seldom go into
"myth" of the political order.2 These commentators
and when they do, the understandable
detail about this "myth,"
on that portion of Hobbes's myth
tendency has been to concentrate
which starts with man in the state of mere nature, the classic "war of
all against all," and proceeds to the contract which creates the Levia
on this portion of his myth;
than state. Hobbes himself concentrates
the rest he leaves largely undetailed,
expressed in a few highly rhetori
cal passages or imbedded in his metaphors.
But Hobbes vehemently
denied that his system owed anything to
In a sense he is right about that: whereas
the "idea of
metaphor.
order" which dominated
before and
thinking
political
immediately
on metaphor
and
during his time3 operated by a logic dependent
Hobbes's
"correspondence,"
system
operates
by
complex
of
logic
cause and effect. If we ignore the fact that Hobbes's

no
cause and effect are themselves deeply metaphori
tions of mechanical
cal, then Hobbes has reason to claim that his system, unlike the "idea
on metaphor.
But Hobbes uses metaphors
of order," is not dependent
mechanical
the "mortal god," "the

throughout Leviathan?"the
body politic,"
soul of commonwealth,"
"the first chaos of violence and civil war,"
"NxATURE, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world,"
to mention
only
some
of
the
most
crucial
and
obvious
ones.
We
can
1 See
of works by Ernst Cassirer; Max Black, Models

and Metaphors
any number
C. Pepper, World Hypotheses
and Los Angeles,
1962); Stephen
(Ithaca,
(Berkeley
The Myth
1942); Colin Murray
Turbayne,
(New Haven,
ofMetaphor
1962).
2Michael
to Thomas Hobbes,
"Introduction"
Leviathan
Oakeshott,
(Oxford, 1955),
Politics
and Vision
p. xvii; Sheldon S. Wolin,
(Boston,
i960), pp. 238-85; Lee Cameron
Western Political
T.
McDonald,
Age (New York,
Theory: The Modern
1962); William
Theories
Bluhm,
Cliffs, N.J.,
of the Political
System
1965), pp. 260-81;
(Englewood
Michael Walzer,
"On the Role of Symbolism
in Political
Political
Science
Thought,"
Quarterly, Lxxxn
(1967), 199.
3W. H.
and Politics
Greenleaf,
Order, Empiricism
(London,
1964), esp. Ch. II.
of this complex of ideas, by Hardin
discussion
and
Literary
Craig, E. M. W. Tillyard,
is widespread
and well-known.
many
others,
31
Alexander
32
put this down to rhetoric,
but I suspect
have a deeper
such metaphors
significance.
to Hobbes's metaphors,
If we pay attention
piece them together,
and question the logic that integrates them, I suspect we come close to
far more
the subjective
than his famous
which,
assumptions,
"method,"
control?his
guide?even
from an a priori World

but
construct,
it would
most
demonstrate,
still be
that
the
were
Even
prove.
do not
this
so revealed
the "myth"
to
resemblance
arise
metaphors
his logic and metaphysics
elucidate,
important
remarkable
The
thinking.
Picture which
theories
of
denied,
bears
and
Order
the
Corre
this re
is ordinarily felt to have destroyed:
the
of
the
of
Hobbes's
raises
relation
issue
immediately
an issue generally by
thought to that of his immediate predecessors,
enormous
in
of
the
effect on subse
favor
of
Hobbes's
study
passed
which Hobbes
spondence
semblance
theory.
quent
rather brief discussion which follows will not go into detail

not even
about the implications of every one of Hobbes's metaphors,
I mean only to
the implications of all the most important metaphors.
I intend only to out
suggest; I shall make no effort to be exhaustive.
line Hobbes's myth
in sufficient detail to make a case for its presence
and to point out several of the more important ques
and importance
The
it
tions
On
raises.
abstruse
the
at
elements
the
as
Hobbes
the
of
his myth
only
to
elements
other works,
elaboration
sketches
of
expense
draw freely on Hobbes's

Leviathan
I mean
whole
one
of
himself
larger
the
I shall,
known.
well
for Hobbes
part
on
concentrate
more
also,
thought
of
system.
to Leviathan.
in the famous Introduction
is by the
the art whereby
God hath made
the world,
and governs
so in this also
in many
that it can make
other
imitated,
things,
. . .Art
an artificial
and most
that rational
animal.
goes yet further,
imitating
man.
of nature,
work
For by art is created
that great LEVIATHAN
excellent
NATURE,
art of man,
as
called a COMMONWEALTH,
an
or STATE,
in Latin CIVITAS, which
is but
the natural,
than
of greater
stature
and
though
strength
the sover
in which
for whose
and defence
it was
and
intended;
protection
...
the
to the whole
is an artificial
life and motion
body
eignty
soul, as giving
were
at first made,
the parts
of this body politic
pacts and covenants,
by which
or the let us make man,
set together,
and united,
resemble
pronounced
that^a/,
artificial
by God
To
man;
in the
describe
creation.
the nature
of
this
artificial
and
the
man,
I will
consider
which
is man.4
4
in English Works,
ed. Sir William
Molesworth
Leviathan,
to Hobbes's
references
in the text and
in, ix-x. Further
works,
several volumes
of the Molesworth
edition
(E.W.).
(London,
in notes,
First,
the matter
thereof,
artificer;
both
1839-45)?
are to the
The Myth
of Power:
Hobbes's
Leviathan
33
In the beginning
there exist God and the unformed matter of the
world. God inHis omnipotence
commands that this matter take form.
to hold the now-formed
He continues
in its order by His
universe
Power.
Supreme
As
like every other

man
guage
for men
own
of
part
animal
this
but
reason.
achieves
But
in the unique
(except
God
creates
He
universe
for the unique
not
does
an
man,
animal
gift of language.
institute
lan
By
governments
case of the Jews). Men must
create their
polities.
In the absence of any such "artificial" polities, men exist in a

state of "mere nature" like unto the original unformed
chaos. The
state of mere nature is a war of all against all, lacking any civilized
or
decencies
this
chaos,
commodities,
men
covenant
where
fear
one
with
of
death
to
another
To
pervades.
all
invest
escape
their
separate
the "mortal
into one sovereign artificial power?the
Leviathan,
in
the
Leviathan
social
This
then
establishes
order
world, build
god."
powers
ing
a new
social
universe
in accordance
with
the
Laws
and
of Nature,
together by his absolute power. He

holding this new commonwealth
to
God alone holds the sovereign re
God
his
and
people,
interprets
acts.
his
But
for
idea
should not be confused with some
this
sponsible
"divine right" arguments,
since in Hobbes's
system the "mortal god"
from God but indirectly through the cov
is not instituted directly
enant of all with
all. He thus is said to have his authority

from the
but
God.
also?indirectly?from
subjects,
Should there be any error in the institution of the commonwealth
so that the sovereign power is divided, or should men or groups of men
to develop power enough to challenge the sovereign power
or should the sovereign fail to maintain
the "peace and
successfully,
common defence" and all necessary commodities
for which he was in
be allowed
the
stituted?then
in effect
power
sovereign
ceases
to
exist,
the
com
monwealth
dissolves back into the state of mere nature. This dissolu
tion can happen at large, as in a civil war, or for individuals at any
time
they
refuse
to
acknowledge
the
sovereign
power.
with what has been called the "Elizabethan

Everyone
World Picture," with what Greenleaf
calls the "idea of order," will
structure
Its
this
recognize
myth.
produces a series of analogies: God
creates
the
Nature
through
physical universe and natural men; Men
reason
create
the
through
sovereign; the sovereign through Law (com
familiar
creates
mand)
the
"the
commonwealth,
man."
artificial
state
These
and every key

to include more details,
could be expanded
element at any level of the structure would still relate to similar ele
ments
ments
on
the
other
two
levels.
But
whereas
this
structure
of
"cor
Alexander
34
this Universal Order, was felt to be itself an argument

respondences,"
Hobbes's
goes to great lengths to establish
by
predecessors, Hobbes
direct causal links?explicitly
mechanical
links?between
material,
an
each element. Hobbes
states
in
his
belief
fully
utterly determined,
in his debate with Bishop Bramhall. The idea
mechanistic
universe
as in this passage on
in Leviathan
appears
largely by implication,
God's
existence
Curiosity,
consideration
cause;
and incomprehensibility.
or
of
love
the
till of necessity
there
whereof
cause,
God.
So
that
it
without
cannot
they
For as a man
by
effect,
he must
is no
to
of causes,
and
cause;
to this thought
knowledge
seek the
come
but
former
impossible
inclined
being
though
nature.
selves
the
is
causes,
conceive,
and
is the
of
cause,
to make
draws
again,
at last,
is eternal;
any profound
to believe
there
a man
the
cause
there
that
which
from
the
of
that
is some
is it men
inquiry
is one
into
call
natural
God
eternal;
thereby
to his
idea of him
in their mind,
answerable
any
men
them
that
is born blind,
talk of warming
hearing
the fire, and being
to warm
himself
easily
by the same, may
brought
men
and assure
there
call fire,
is somewhat
himself,
there, which
have
there
the heat he feels; but cannot

what
it is like; nor
imagine
it in his mind,
such as they have
that see it: so also by the
a man may
in this world,
and their admirable
conceive
order,
things
men
is a cause
of them, which
not an idea, or
call God;
and yet have
image
of him
an
have
visible
cause
idea
of
of
in his mind.5
(in,
92-93)
Hobbes
argued in many places that God and the soul must both
be corporeal. He also maintained
that it was impious to assign any
to God other than existence,
attribute
incompre
infinity, eternity,
and omnipotence
(in, 350-54).
hensibility,
Infinity, eternity, and in
he calls "negative"
attributes;
they express only
comprehensibility
our inability to conceive God's magnitude,
duration, and so on (in,
27). Indeed, apart from existence, the only positive attribute he con
But Hobbes derives a good
sistently applies to God is "omnipotence."6
5This
like many
another
much more
than its
in Leviathan,
contains
passage,
surface meaning,
and it may be useful to indicate briefly here just how densely meta
is. Consider,
for instance,
the unstated
from design con
phoric the passage
argument
in the innocuous
tained
"their admirable
order." Consider
the image of the
phrase
fire. Fire stands not only for the world which
cannot be seen, but for the intellectual
fire is linked to the sun (cf. 1, 75; iv, 7), and
light (cf. in, title page, and pp. 36-37);
thus to God Himself
to the burning
and in a later reference
(both in this passage
bush
and the eternal I AM?in,

353), and to Kings
themselves
108). The men who warm
by the fire and
could represent
the prophets
variously
(particularly
Plato's
of the Cave").
"Allegory
6 In The
Questions
Concerning
Liberty, Necessity,
versy with Bishop Bramhall),
E.W.,
cience and Absolute
Foreknowledge.
v, Hobbes
But both
and vn,
(cf. in, 5, 169, 569-70;
who have an idea of its nature
and philosophers
Moses),
(cf.
and Chance
argues extensively
these attributes
(part of the contro

from God's Omnis
depend,
ultimately,
The Myth
Hobbes's
of Power:
Leviathan
35
deal from this one attribute: God's governance

of all things, His role
as Creator, His authorship of all human actions and laws, His knowl
edge of all things.
If Hobbes does talk a great deal about God in Leviathan, he says
next to nothing about the Creation, except that it happened, and that
he
to
is content
follow
about
information
his
1. In a discussion
marks:
"The
Moses.
We
of "The Absurd
matter
unformed
can,
however,
together
piece
some
views.
opinion
of the world,
of Gentilism"
a
was
god,
by
the
he re
name
of
original
in
clear that the "absurdity"
(in, 99). The context makes
is in attributing
godhead to the chaos, not in assuming an
chaos itself. A later passage links Chaos v/ith the state of mere
nature:
"For
Chaos"
volved
when
Christian
take
men,
not
their
Christian
sovereign,
for God's prophet,

and by
they must
[rely on some other authority]
all laws, both divine and human,
reduce all
this means
destroying
and society, to the first chaos of violence and civil
order, government,
war"
(111,427).
2. In Leviathan Hobbes
approves the Genesis version of Creation,
even to such details as the creation of man from dust (in, 615), and the
commands of the great Fiat. His remarks on this indicate that God
exists prior toHis created world?
"the command of God, to the light,
to
the
firmament,
be" was
to
the
sun,
and
stars,
when
he
commanded
them
to
improper, he says, just because "they could not hear

insists that
before they had a being" (in, 640-41). Elsewhere Hobbes
it is impiety to think that God and the world coexisted
eternally
not
(hi, 35i)-7
3. In "The Author's Epistle
as
speaks of Philosophy
to the Reader"
own
and your
as it was
its father,
imitate
the creation:
if you
[therefore]
reason move
let your
the deep
of
upon
must
those
that
lie in confusion
things
the
child
but
like
of
the
world
the world
for De Corpore Hobbes
. . .
not
fashioned
yet,
perhaps
. . .
a thing
confused
in the beginning,
in good
will be a philosopher
earnest,
own cogitations
and experience;
your
mind
and
be set asunder,
distinguished,
its own name
set in order;
that is to say, your method
with
stamped
that of the creation.
The
of the creation
resemble
order
was,
light, dis
one
every
must
on His
Power
is one of Hobbes's
basic concepts,
and is linked to his
Omnipotence.
of cause,
will
and desire,
domination,
submission,
command,
generation,
for all the diverse
becomes
and so on. "Power"
types
obligation,
highly metaphorical,
of power Hobbes
thinks to be exactly
like one another.
7But one
also puzzle over the ambiguous
relations
between
i, io-n,
E.W,,
might
notions
410-14;
in, 351; iv, 349; v, 442-43
Alexander
36
Unction
man;
of day
after
and,
templation
and after
will
and
the
night,
creation,
the
the firmament,
the commandment.
the
space,
to command.
be, reason,
definition,
is grown
up, subjection
man
sensible
luminaries,
Therefore
the
sensible
stars,
order
creatures,
of con
man;
quality,
(1, xiii)
is established
The metaphoric
link between rationality and Creation
again in the Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance where
Hobbes
about
remarks
find in those that write

and
their
so many
followers,
drawn
"arguments
of this argument,
words
from
natural
especially
strangers
to our
"I
reason":
in the Schoolmen
and
language,
such
confusion and inanity in the ranging of them, as that a man's mind in

the reading of them distinguisheth
nothing. And as things were in the
beginning before the Spirit of God was moved upon the abyss, tohu
so are their dis
and bohu, that is to say, confusion and emptiness;
courses"
(v,
19-20).
rebukes the
with Bishop Bramhall, Hobbes
4. In a controversy
Bishop: "From that I say of the universe, he infers, that I make God
to be nothing: but infers it absurdly. He might
indeed have inferred
that I make him a corporeal, but yet a pure spirit. I mean by the uni
and so
verse, the aggregate of all things that have being in themselves;
do all men else. And because God has a being, it follows that he is
either the whole universe, or part of it. Nor does his Lordship go about
to disprove it, but only seems to wonder at it" (iv, 349).
From
such
remarks,
one
can
all of which,
processes.
in Leviathan
"Form"
analyzed
a Creation
reconstruct
exists, and an unformed matter

(chaos)
in
is contained
by God?or
perhaps
operates by normal cause and effect,
of cause and effect seriously)
metaphors
sense perception
generation
and/or
story.
either also exists, or

God. God's act of
and (if we take all
by an act like that
God
is created
Creation
Hobbes's
of sexual
the thought process,

and/or
as analogous
and elsewhere, are presented
as
product
of
"generation"
derives
attributes
of the active and passive causes taken
together (iv, 309). The form of the generated thing is implicit (but not
in its causes. Thus: (a) the "form" of a triangle is im
"^formed")
plicit in the definitions of "angle," "a side," "line," and so on, which
combine (copulate) to cause the triangle; (b) the "form"?that
is, the
a proposition
is implicit in the two names copulated;
meaning?of
(c) the form of an animal is implicit in the attributes of the male and
from the combined
female "causes" copulated;

(d) the senses (passive cause) and external
stimuli (active cause) copulate to beget phantasms
in the brain; (e)
or definitions)
words (or imaginings, or perceptions,
copulate with one
The Myth
of Power:
Hobbes's
Leviathan
37
to produce thoughts;
involve the
(f) mathematical
operations
In thought,
of numbers.
(the addition and subtraction)
copulation
cause and effect, all the attributes of the
and mechanical
procreation,
of the
thing caused are wholly
implicit in the combined attributes
causes themselves. God
active and passive (the effective and material)
another
acts,
then,
in an
on
an
unformed,
passive
matter
to generate
all the attributes

of which are wholly
implicit
and in God's will. The separate bodies inmotion
verse,
matter
immense,
finely
complex,
tuned
formed
uni
in the original
then cooperate
mechanism.
Such a creation would resemble the clockwork universe myth of the

eighteenth century were it not for the fact that, for Hobbes, God con
tinues actively to operate the machine,
through the ordinary operation
of Nature,
"ordained in the Creation." Hobbes distinguishes
between
acts of God?and
the continuous work of God
miracles?immediate
in the ordinary course of Nature
which proceeds
(in, Ch. 37). God's
power enforcing universal order impresses itself on us all the more if
we consider the larger implications
of the "mortal god" metaphor.
The soul imparts form and motion
to the body and holds the body
the soul the body dissolves. The sovereign, who is
together; without
often spoken of as the "soul" of the body politic, holds the common
wealth together by his absolute power and without his power the com
monwealth
dissolves.
The
sovereign
is also
a "mortal
god."
Moreover,
Hobbes often speaks of God as a King. Now what can all this mean if
in common with Kings or souls? Kings are the
God shares nothing
souls of the body politic, they create the commonwealth,
they rule by
their commands which are the law, they have absolute power and
exercise it to maintain
order. So does God inHis Kingdom, Nature.
or
comes close to identifying God with Nature,
In all this Hobbes
calling God the "soul of the world," a Neo-Platonic
opinion that he
the deeper we get into such matters
in Hobbes's
text.
explicit statements
toward state
argument was moving
actions of God, or the details of the
incomprehen
stopped short, declared the matter
that he accepted the Scriptural account.
himself rejected (in, 351). But

the further we get from any
it appeared that his
Whenever
or
ments
about the attributes
Creation, Hobbes
sible, and insisted
differs
Man, "that rational and most excellent wTork of Nature,"
from other animals essentially only in this: that he has been given the
gift of tongues, he has language; he possesses words
(in, 11, 33; i,
66-68; iv, 2; v, 186 ff.).
Alexander
38
was
most
invention
of all other,
that of SPEECH,
noble
and profitable
or appellations,
men
of names
and their connexion;
consisting
whereby
register
recall
them when
their thoughts;
and also declare
them one to
they are past;
for mutual
and conversation;
without
there had been
another
utility
which,
nor society,
nor contract,
nor peace,
no
neither
men,
amongst
commonwealth,
The
more
than
God
himself,
amongst
that
and wolves.
The
lions, bears,
to name
how
Adam
instructed
first
such
author
of
creatures
speech
as he
was
pre
sented to his sight; for the Scripture goeth no further in this matter. But this
was
the
sufficient
creatures
as to make
degrees,
language
might
as the experience
to add more
him
and use of
names,
and to join them
in such manner
give him occasion;
by
so much
and so by succession
himself
of time,
understood;
as he had found use for. . . . (m,
gotten,
18-19)
to direct
should
be
So much of the first part of Leviathan

I feel no need to go into detail here. The
ment
is that (apart from His destruction
to language that
is devoted
essential point for our argu
of Babel, from His peculiar
contract with the Jews, from the coming of Christ) God interferes in
man's political and social life only by teaching him language. Through
sense and speech man acquires his peculiar psychology,
and thereby
But he also acquires through
all contentions, malice, and depravity.
sense and speech logic, reason, geometry,
sciences, and all civilized
commodities.
Men
are
capable
of
reasoning
their
way
to
an
under
standing of their baleful situation in this life, and then to a knowledge

of the end of Peace and Order and to the construction
of the Leviathan
which can create Order and insure Peace. One of God's immediate
interventions was His covenant with the Jews, by which He created
and a body of Divine Positive
for them peculiarly, a commonwealth
Law. But for all other peoples, God is the Author of Law only because
He is the Author of Nature
and has given all of us five senses and
language.8
and reason "move upon the deep" of our "own

imagination
and
distinc
ordering the confusion, making
cogitations
experience,"
names.
in
The
first
this
tions, applying
operation
"resolutive-composi
Our
tive"9
case,
process
would
international
be
an
confusion
analysis
from
and the
intense
experience?in
individualism,
Hobbes's
acquisi
8 In his
all acts to God. These
Hobbes
with Bramhall,
does attribute
controversy
are not God's
the chains of causality
immediate
acts, but only His because
through
in God. See E.W.,
all acts originate
in, 197-98; v, 105-106,
340.
ultimately
9For discussions
see Neal Ward
of this "method"
Renaissance
Gilbert,
Concepts
of Sci
(New York,
Randall,
Jr., "The Development
of Method
i960); John Herman
1 (1940), 177-206;
in the School of Padua,"
entific Method
and Ralph M. Blake,
JHI,
et al,
"Introduction."
Theories
Walter
(Seattle,
J. Ong,
of Scientific Method
i960),
and the Decay
is also
Mass.,
S.J., Ramus: Method,
of Dialogue
(Cambridge,
1958),
should not be confused with the Ramists.
very useful, but Hobbes
The Myth
tiveness,
and
civil
war
of
his
own
of Power:
Leviathan
Hobbes's
causes
England?to
39
na
in human
the structure of
second operation
(that which controls
would work from the facts of human nature through an
to a comprehension
of the Laws of
analysis of human psychology,
and thence to the generation of the Leviathan?the
great end
Nature,
which directs our chain of reasoning
153). The
(in, 13-15, 36-37,
sureness of Hobbes's
this
absolute
design springs from our making
ture. The
Leviathan)
system?its
and
definitions,
its
rules,
out
its matter?ourselves,
of
ourselves.10 In this we imitate the original Fiat.

We must begin with knowledge of the "matter" and the "artificer"
cause and effective cause?of
the state, "both of which is
?material
man." But then, because civil order is not to be assumed but rather
and artificer
made rationally, we must proceed to imagine the matter
the
in a condition wholly
lacking civil order. We must understand
condition of man in the absence of any society or any polity. But since
this
nonsocial-nonpolitical
ever
nor
generally,
"state
has
to human
of mere
knowledge,
nature"
we
does
must
not
"feign"
now
exist
such
as he himself always
state. The "state of mere nature" is for Hobbes,
fiction. Hobbes
feigns it by a process he also
insists, a methodological
uses when he defines "space" by imagining all things but himself
is then uthe phantasm of a thing existing without
annihilated?"space"
in which we consider
the mind simply; that is to say, that phantasm,
no other accident, but only that it appears without us" (1, 91-94) .n
of the
Hobbes
feigns the state of mere nature by the annihilation
10For a detailed
and
of this complicated
idea, see Arthur Child, "Making
analysis
in
Publications
in Hobbes,
and Dewey,"
Vico,
University
of California
No.
The Historic
13 (1053), pp. 271-310.
Development
Enriques,
Federigo
is also very helpful.
trans. Jerome Rosenthal
(New York,
1929), pp. 68-75,
of Logic,
11This
on by George Croom Robertson,
is commented
Hobbes
(Edin
similarity
a trivial quirk
in Hobbes's
appear
1886), p. 143 n. This may
burgh and London,
we make ourselves
is an imaginary
construct
"Space"
thought, but it is in fact essential.
some
Hobbes's
of "body"
insist now that it is an existent
definitions
by ratiocination.
now that it is "full space"
no dependence
what
upon our thought,"
(cf. 1,
"having
at
of Body
and Space allow us to consider
definitions
in, 381). Hobbes's
102, with
can "make" Body:
insofar as body be con
least one sense in which human
reasoning
on our imagination
But our
then Body depends
for its definition.
sidered "full space,"
on sense
of Body,
of Space depends
that is, ultimately
definition
upon our memory
Knowing
Philosophy,
the subjective
thus form part of Hobbes's
definitions
bridge between
in Hobbes,"
See S. Morris
and Equivocation
Engel,
"Analogy
De
is also pertinent.
pp. xxvi-xxvii,
Oakeshott,
(1962), 330-32.
can
of "space"
of the intricacies
of seventeenth-century
definitions
tailed discussion
be found inMilic" Capek, The Philosophical
(Princeton,
Physics
Impact of Contemporary
I.
Mass.,
Concepts
Jammer,
of Space
1954). Samuel
1961), and Max
(Cambridge,
this defini
The Hunting
Mintz,
of the Leviathan
(Cambridge,
1962), pp. 92-95, discusses
to that of Henry More.
tion as opposed
These
perception.
and the objective.
xxxvn
Philosophy',
Alexander
40
and all civilized society. The state of mere nature is a

state, and probably never existed for any large group
imaginary
purely
of people anywhere or at any time. But being imaginary it can, like
serve as a starting point for a fully rationalistic
politics.
"space,"
to introduce into
The "state of mere nature" so defined allows Hobbes
identi
his authoritarian
system ideas of "social contract" previously
fied with Hooker or with more "libertarian"
thought. It is a state in
which,
ironically, men have the liberty and autonomy desired by the
and the sects. Then, on the basis of an analysis of human
Puritans
Commonwealth
nature which, except for his mechanical

closely resembles
explanation,
such
ideas of original sin, Hobbes demonstrates
traditional Christian
a state to be such pure hell that all rational men would desire nothing
more than to surrender most of this liberty in the interests of peace.12
Rational men, fearing death, hating disorder, desiring commodious
living, hoping to obtain civilized life, work out rationally the laws of
and
Nature
then
proceed,
to
reason,
by
The
Leviathan.
generate
of this new social world comes about initially?causally?

that is to say through names?
through the operation of thought,
the
words. So too the sovereign power, by establishing authoritatively
of the basic political words?"right,"
definitions
"law," "contract,"
creation
"freedom,"
"covenant,"
etc.?initiates
the
And just so?through

monwealth.13
structed the world.14 (The analogies
the
macrocosm-microcosm
traditional
Hobbes
always
the thought
discusses
analogy,
Human
of
construction
com
the
con
Himself
the WTord?God
come closer when we consider first
Nature
that
second
and
as psychology,15
that
is, as
process.)
An essential step in the thought process of civil philosophy

(the
art through which, imitating God's Art, we create an artificial life) is
those "dictates of reason" which
the discovery of the Laws of Nature,
underlie any stable polity. Just what Hobbes might mean by the
phrase
"Laws
of Nature"
has
always
been
puzzle,
puzzle
greatly
by the meanings which attach to this phrase in the whole

complicated
Natural
Law tradition. Certainly Hobbes must have been aware of
12
Wolin,
13
Wolin,
14To be
pp. 262-65.
pp. 265 ff.
it clear that "Word" here is used "metaphorically"
makes
sure, Hobbes
the world,
to stand "for the decrees and power of God"
(in, 409). God, Who makes
the world absolutely,
and thus has no need for "words"
knows
per se in the Creation.
so that we can imitate Him.
But He gives us words
15
iv, 2-3; i, 67.
The Myth
of Power:
Hobbes's
Leviathan
41
the traditional
of the phrase, and aware of the way in
interpretations
use
which his peculiar
of it contrasted
and conflicted with those
traditions.16
face
we
Unfortunately
can
do
little
more
than
scratch
the
sur
here.
In Leviathan Hobbes
only to those "precepts"
applies the phrase "law of nature" explicitly

adherence to which underlies any and every
civil
order. Hobbes
insists that these "laws of nature"
lasting peaceful
are
so
as
remain precepts
long
only rules of order discovered by
they
reason; they become laws, strictly speaking, only when instituted by
the
sovereign
power,
only
when
commanded
by
the
"mortal
god."
all men
are somehow
he repeatedly
insisted
to
and
follow these laws,
this seeming inconsistency
has
"obliged"
produced a long and so far inconclusive debate about just what it was
Hobbes believed was the basis of "obligation"?God's
omnipotence?
that
Nevertheless
human
reason?
the King's
commands?
We
complicate
the matter
even
if we accept Mortimer
that Hobbes
im
Taube's
argument
of
understood
the
observable
the
regularities
plicitly
physcial universe
be "laws of
laws," as they have come to be called?to
?"physical
further
nature"
commanded
by
God.17
16Frederick
of Natural
A. Olafson,
"Thomas
Hobbes
and the Modem
Theory
a fine discussion
iv (1966), 15-30, provides
Law," Journal
of the History
of Philosophy,
to traditional
relation
Law
theories:
traditional
Natural
of Hobbes's
Natural
LawT
who would
theories
left unresolved
law conflicted with Natural
judge when a positive
resolves
this conflict by making
his Laws of Nature
only "procedural,"
Law; Hobbes
the content
how to set up the commonwealth,
but never specifying
of posi
directing
tive law. See also Otto Gierke, Natural
Law and the Theory of Society,
1500 to 1800
1957; orig. 1913), esp. pp. 60-61.
(Boston,
17Mortimer
"Dr. Zilsel on the Concept
of Physical
Taube,
Law," Philosophical
that follows I shall make
Review, lii (1943), 305. In the discussion
just this assumption,
but I do it knowing very well that Hobbes
himself refused to use the phrase "laws of na
in
ture" in this way. We are faced with the paradox
that Hobbes
denies what
explicitly
men will or not, they must
be
other places his language
strongly
implies. "Whether
. . .But to call this power of God, which
to the divine power.
extendeth
subject always
itself not only to man, but also to beasts, and plants, and bodies inanimate,
by the name
use of the word. For he only is properly
is but a metaphorical
said to reign,
of kingdom,
that governs his subjects by his word, and by promise
of rewards to those that obey
therefore in the
them with punishment
that obey it not. Subjects
it, and by threatening
nor creatures
of God, are not bodies inanimate,
they under
irrational; because
kingdom
"
as his ...
stand no percepts
(ni, 344; cf. 11, 204-205).
I can only sketch in a possible
The
idea of God commanding
"laws
explanation.
to the physical universe was growing at this time. Often
it went hand in hand
of nature"
with a Neo-Platonic
animism, which Hobbes would
reject. But it could also imply, as it
had no further need of God's
which
forward, an ordered universe
An Essay onMetaphysics
[Oxford,
power for its maintenance
(R. G. Collingwood,
as I have already
Hobbes
1940], p. 49), an idea which,
repudiated. We are
suggested,
the "physical
law" metaphor
left with the paradox: Hobbes's
suggests
language strongly
did
from Newton
active
Alexander
42
If we accept all the implications of Hobbes's

"myth," then we can
a
for the phrase
out
number of differing but analogous meanings
work
"Laws
of
In
Nature."
and what
"Laws"?
is "Nature,"
there
is also
a necessary
Laws
Hobbes's
are they Laws
and why
insists on the "command"
i. Hobbes
2. But
are
sense
what
of
Nature,
of Nature?
theory of Law.
sense
"laws"
in which
are
ideal
of the funda
of universal
realities, that is, descriptions
descriptions
mental
regularities underlying all existent civil polity.
3. And there is a further sense in which
they are "precepts,"
"rules,"
"dictates,"
I submit
Corpore
same
or
"counsels."
that Hobbes means all these at once. In a passage from De

it signify the
he defines "power" in such a way as to make
as
thing
He
"cause."
continues
that
while
the name
of laws, but
theorems
concerning
improperly;
what
are but
for they
conduceth
to
the
are
they
thing, they are called by the different names because

refer to its position in time and at another time we refer
produce an effect.18 The same situation applies here. A
one way is a command,
if "considered"
of Nature,
another way
another way is a precept, if "considered"
of observed behavior: "These dictates of reason, men
the
same
at one time we
to its ability to
particular Law
if "considered"
is a description
to call by
or
conclusions,
used
conservation
and
de
is the word of him, that

fence of themselves; whereas
law, properly,
over
But
command
others.
hath
yet if we consider the same
by right
as
in
of
word
delivered
the
God, that by right commandeth
theorems,
all things; then are they properly called laws" (in, 147).
I think it will seem just to anyone who has read Leviathan that
in a number of different
Hobbes
also considers the one thing Nature
course
work.
of
in
the
the
aspects
1. Nature
2. Nature
3. Nature
universal mechanism;
isThe Creation?the
is the ordinary operation of that mechanism;
from unformed
is the art used to create that mechanism
matter;
4. Human
nature
is, then,
the
aggregate
of human
attributes
con
from his time on; but he himself draws back from this and re
grew so powerful
and impact of the
For extensive
of the development
discussions
it as "metaphor."
see Taube,
Freedom
and Determinism
law" metaphor,
Causation,
(London,
"physical
Re
of Physical
of the Concept
Law," Philosophical
1936); Edgar Zilsel, "The Genesis
in China
Science and Civilization
(Cam
view, li (1942), 247-49; and Joseph Needham,
which
jects
533-43
bridge,
1956), 11, 519-21,
18
see also 1, 5, and rv, 309.
1,127-28;
The Myth
of Power:
Hobbes's
Leviathan
43
sidered as part of Nature,

that is, only as mechanisms,
with no "arti
ficial" or "civil" context imposed;
nature is the logical operation of the mind.
5. Human
(For 4 and
5 see
iv,
2.)
Thus, when Hobbes

speaks of the "state of mere nature" he means
the condition men would live in if all civil authority and society were
suddenly done away with, and also the behavior of human beings
when they act according to their inherent "natures," with no regard
to the restraints of civil authority. When he says that we know some
that we know it through the ordinary
thing "by nature" he means
of our experience of
operations of our minds and by the examination
nature. All of these things are really one thing, a total system seen
now in one aspect, now in another, the whole system implicit in those
first causes?the
and
matter,
the
passive
active
cause of the essential

cause
of God's
properties
of unformed
"will."
If we consider God's evident desire to create an ordered universe,

the laws of nature were the rules He followed
in generating
order,
based on his understanding
of the "nature" of the un
necessarily
cause. And they were
formed matter which was to be the material
"rational"
constructs,
and
And
precepts.
because
He
commanded
in the Creation,
them, they were "laws." Imitating God's Operations
the philosopher
first comes to an understanding
of human nature,
which he knows "by nature"
if he will examine his own behavior
and apply the already-proven-reliable
methods
of
disinterestedly
These accurate descriptions
of human
Euclid, Galileo, and Harvey.
behavior are rational reconstructions
by the philosopher
examining a
creation of God, of the regularities built by God into the man-ma
can construct
this understanding
the philosopher
his
asking how we can bind these irrational, selfish, concupiscent,
chine. With
system,
competitive
men-machines
into
one
harmonious
commonwealth.
for this is the greatest difficulty, how can we do this and

Moreover,
not violate their essential natures? For the mechanism
that violates
the nature of the material
from which it is built must collapse.
So the civil philosopher works out, by accurate addition and sub
traction of the basic definitions he has already derived, a system of
"laws" adherence to which underlies any and every lasting, peaceful,
are rules and
civil order. The laws of nature from this consideration,
the commonwealth
has yet to be constructed,
and men
precepts?for
to it. And they are
do not understand
yet exactly their obligation
Alexander
44
and binding, because they are found out by reason,

also obligatory
are thereby commands of God which men are obliged to will to follow:
commands of God because God commands order in His Creation, and
in the Scriptures, and because it isHe who built into us the processes
and because God controls the
which result in the Laws of Nature,
the Laws of Nature
and Will that lead us to conceive
Reason
(in,
343-45)
the principles of civil order, thus discovered,
The Laws of Nature,
lead all rational men to covenant with one another to construct the
in the famous
There are three crucial images involved
Leviathan.
account?the
union
mystic
tal god," and the sovereign

is more
This
This
than
same
the
and
done,
in Latin
CIVITAS.
This
To these we need to add the metaphor

sovereign
which
expiring,
wealth;
carcase
of a man,
An even more
The
other.
which
by
his
explicit
error
a "mor
soul,
public
the members
departed,
statement
of
of that great
that
defence,
mortal
(in,
god,
to
158)
that
life and
giving
are governed
though
immortal,
motion
to
the
common
than
by it no more,
soul,
(in, 321-22)
the
occurs near the end of Leviathan:
first argument
the
is, that he says,
[Bellarmine's]
as of a natural
one of an
body,
depend
commonwealth,
but they depend
It is true, they cohere
only on the sovereign,
together;
which
is
the commonwealth
is the soul of the commonwealth;
failing,
other
members
is the generation
to speak more
rather,
reverently,
the immortal
and
under
God, our peace
is the
as
sovereign
or
LEVIATHAN,
we owe
which
. . . the
the
person,"
or concord;
it is a real unity
of them
all, in one
. . .
of every man with
every man.
by convenant
so united
a COMMON
in one person,
is called
consent,
made
person,
the multitude
WEALTH,
in "one
as "generated"
dissolved
of
body
his
every
into a civil war,
of a common
natural
in this
no one man
so much
as cohering
on a known
sovereign;
dependence
of a
for want
dissolve
into earth,
to another,
for want
of the
just as the members
soul to hold
them
together.
(hi, 576-77)
in these passages
involved
taken
complex set of metaphors
to
to
to
the
the
union
God
link
soul,
mystical
"generation,"
together
to the sovereign power, to kings.
of all in one, to the commonwealth,
The key to this complex is Hobbes's
concept of cause. The efficient
The
on the "material
or
cause"
cause,"
working
"power")
or
are
"cause
the
cause,"
together
simple,"
"passive
power")
("passive
or the
to produce
all causes
the
cause."
When
"sufficient
necessary
cause
("active
are present together, the effect is produced

and
immediately
are
and
effects
Such
continuously
endlessly
"generated"
necessarily.
to the First Cause,
all traceable ultimately
in chains of causality,
effect
The Myth
of Power:
Hobbes's
Leviathan
45
efficient cause, or perhaps both efficient

God. God, the First Cause?an
cause together, if we accept the hint thrown out in the
and material
to Bishop Bramhall?generates
and is that
Answer
His Creation,
inert dust (cf. hi, 385,
motion
Creation. The soul?vital
activating
an
443)?as
active
cause
generates
the
living
man;
and
as
the
"es
sence" of man, as life itself (in, 615), the soul might be considered to
be the man. The soul is especially like God in that it holds the body
together by His
together by its power just as God holds His Creation
Power. When a multitude
of men combine their separate wills into one
in doing which they are both
will, they generate the commonwealth,
cause (in, x), and the effect itself. The soul of
effective and material
this body politic is the sovereign power?the
sovereign, the King, the
"mortal god." The sovereign contains in his person all the people; he
of the commonwealth
(courts,
actively generates all the institutions
armies, churches, parliaments,
commerce) ; and he holds
universities,
in order through his laws and his invincible power.
the commonwealth
is the commonwealth,
in his person the
The sovereign
containing
whole people as a unity. And so the sovereign, the King, like God, is
efficient cause, material cause, and the effect itself.
All the attributes
of an effect are implicit in the attributes of its
several
causes.
If
the
causes
are
themselves
perfect,
the
generation
there can be "imperfect

"defectuous
institution,"
of the "body politic"
(in, Ch. 29). God's
especially
procreation,"
of the laws of nature is absolute since He made them; and
knowledge
to those
the universe God generated,
since it is designed according
true laws of nature and infused with His omnipotence,
absolutely
cannot suffer dissolution
except by the will, or the death, of God.
of the laws of nature,
But we made the sovereign, and our knowledge
the common
while
it could be absolute
(since we ourselves make
will be perfect.
wealth),
naturally,
But
has not been truly set forth until Hobbes's De Cive. And so,
all the commonwealths
into
of the wTorld have dissolved
wars.
to those older
Hobbes's myth bears the most striking resemblance
and the
familiar from the doctrine of Correspondences
political myths
complex of notions surrounding the King's Two Bodies.19 The order of
the Macrocosm
ismirrored in the microcosm Man, and mirrored again
19Excellent
can be found in many

doctrines
detailed
treatments
of these medieval
in the well-known
work of Otto Gierke and J. N. Figgis. Less well
sources, for instance
The Kings
Two Bodies
known but of the greatest
value are Ernst H. Kantorowicz,
and the Feudal Law
The Ancient
Constitution
(Princeton,
1957), and J. G. A. Pocock,
(Cambridge,
1957).
46
Alexander
in the artificial "creation" of the commonwealth.

The commonwealth
is a "mystical body" made up of all the citizenry compacted
into one
are
all
of
The
which
members.
contains
person
sovereign power
they
all of them.
all these individual persons in his one person, personating
The acts of the sovereign are the acts of all the citizens, for they have
him. He controls and reigns absolutely.
The idea is
"authorized"
in
of
title
the
famous
page
engraved
Leviathan, with
aptly pictured
its God-like giant King made up of the thousands of individual citi
each turned with his face toward the King's head. Indeed this
picture might well serve as an icon of the "mystical body." The secular
state as a "mystical
body" was an idea that developed
slowly, and
zens,
was held with
entire seriousness for centuries. Hobbes avoids the older

and substitutes
claims for the commonwealth,
for
openly mystical
a
and
mechanism.
he
is
But
analogy
thoroughgoing
just as
mysticism
serious about his "artificial body," his "mortal god." The claims he
makes for it are very close to those made in the tradition. For instance,
Sir John Fortescue:
a company
of men
combine
where
and form them
it is absolutely
necessary,
as the governing
one
some
should
into a body
that
preside
politic,
of King
in kingdoms
under
the name
who
goes
(rex, ?
usually
principal,
an human
as
out
an
is
this
of
formed
In
body, with
embryo,
regendo).
order,
a
one head
is formed
to govern
and control
multitude
it; so, from a confused
selves
it
and
govern.
And,
of a mystical
as in the
to
transmits
the
all
other
is the
care
dential
municates
bers
of
under
thereby
to the head,
said body politic,
whereby
is incorporated,
which
the people
and
several
the
and
it subsists
be
may
and
so is the
compacted,
law
that
ligament
of the word, lex ? ligando) by which

are
members
bones
and
all
bound
the
other
together
members
and
of
united
the
body
due
their
the
the
imparting
and
life,
lives and
is invigorated.
to the
compared
The
law
or
nerves
frame is fitly joined
(to go back
to the
truest
the body politic and all its

as
entire
And
body.
their
preserve
functions,
so do the members
of the
in one
their
offices
several
by the nerves,
can not change
as the head
of the body
natural
by the law. And
or sinews,
can not deny
to the several
their proper
energy,
parts
can a king,
is the
of blood;
who
neither
and aliment
proportion
discharge
community
its nerves
as
to
in it the blood,
the first thing which
sinews of the body natural; for, as by these the whole

together
person,
(according
provision
the
derivation
one
it in the blood,
that
of the people,
is, the pru
having
it transmits
for the public
and com
good, which
as the principal
and to all the rest of the mem
part;
intention
and
body
lives, having
members,
growth and vigour; so, in the body politic,

moves
with
body,
natural
the heart is the first thing which
philosopher)
which
is a sort
which
kingdom,
to guide
regular
head,
head of the body politic, change the laws thereof, nor take from the people
is theirs,
what
20 Sir
cinnati,
by
right,
John Fortescue,
1874), pp. 36-37.
against
De
their
Laudibus
consents.20
Legum
Angliae,
trans.
Francis
Gregor
(Cin
The Myth
There
of these
some
of
are,
course,
the
versions
was
sovereign
Leviathan
between
differences
many
Hobbes's
ideas, and the traditional
traditional
medieval
of Power:
Hobbes's
versions
not
47
above
version
In
themselves.
the
as he
Law,
is
inHobbes,
but instead reigns as a steward of an already existent Law.
In the tradition
law is only occasionally
defined as "command."
Hobbes
insists that the commonwealth
is "artificial" whereas
the
more traditional
versions
insist that the
(for instance Bellarmine's)
commonwealth
is
"natural."
Hobbes's
derives
sovereign
his
power
among his people, not from God

directly from an act of covenanting
com
It would be useful to study in detail just how Hobbes
Himself.
pares with these older traditions, but I must be content here only to
at
point
the
resemblance.
general
it has been noted before that Hobbes's

system seems
in the political writings of Sir Edward Forset.21
curiously anticipated
are
Indeed, if one doesn't look too closely at Forset the similarities
striking. But the similarities derive not from Forset's happy antici
radical genius, but from the fact that Forset is
pation of Hobbes's
For
instance,
wholly
unoriginal,
retailer
of
place in his tradition. Forset gives us the myth

form; Forset employs nothing but
analogical
come
to much
by a method
he
never
argues
the
same
profoundly
from
them.
different.
He
Hobbes
argues
common
in its pure and simple

Hobbes may
but
may
from
most
analogy.
as Forset,
conclusions
was
that
everything
he
comes
to
use metaphors,
system
them
but
of mechanical
cause and effect, with God as the essential First Cause and the con
the vast
tinuing cause of all things natural and "artificial." In Hobbes
are linked together mechanically
into one
network of correspondences
universal world-machine,
each part linked with every part. Indeed,
Hobbes's
metaphors
and
analogies
are
always
grounded
in what
are factual, mechanical

the compared
resemblances,
linked through chains of cause and effect.22 The
actually
phenomena
crucial link, the mechanism
which joins the interior world of mind to
the outside physical world, is sense perception:23 the man-machine
has
senses through which the outside world is (literally) conceived within
Hobbes
thinks
21 W.
Political
Allen,English
(London,
J.
1967; orig. 1938), p. 83.
Thought 1603-1644
22For
it can be argued that Hobbes
believed
it to be a fact that the thought
instance,
is exactly like the process of sexual genera
process
conception,
imagination)
(perception,
tion. His friend Harvey
argued
just this at great length in De Generatione
Animalum,
a metaphor
which
the same year as Leviathan. Thus
appears at first to be
published
little more
than a play on the word "conception"
in what Hobbes
may be grounded
fact.
seriously believed was biological
23See n.
11, above.
Alexander
48
Forset
him.
no
needs
reason.
and
language,
theory
complex
With
Forset,
sense
of
memory,
perception,
is all.
analogy
as it
In spite of this logic, the general shape of Hobbes's myth,
I think this fits with
is quite conventional.
from Leviathan,
own statements
of intention. Hobbes
in all his
proposed
in sound scientific princi
political writings to ground civil philosophy
emerges
Hobbes's
so much
ples?not
to
innovate
doctrine
as
to ground
received
already
doctrine so firmly in science and Scripture that it would henceforth

civil disorder of his time forced
be beyond dispute. The widespread
Hobbes, who valued order as a positive good, to see disorder and the
arrogation of power by individual citizens as the crucial facts of pol
intellectual
itics. The
were
now
everywhere
bases
of civil order,
called
into
never
All
question.
firmly
manner
established,
of men
imag
to espouse any sort of political or religious

ined they had warrant
to their disturbed
system, and license to act according
imaginings.
Among all traditional sciences, only geometry, because of its method,
and because there was general agreement
about its basic definitions,
had been grounded absolutely and allowed no fundamental
disputes.
Mechanics
(after Harvey),
(after Galileo) and physiology
by adopting
the new resolutive-compositive
method and by establishing authorita
had begun to attain the same absolute,
tive definitions,
indisputable
So if Hobbes
could demonstrate
that civil philosophy
authority.
operates
by
the
same
methods
and
with
same
the
certainty
as
geom
etry and the new sciences, then he could establish a civil philosophy
that would both confirm traditional order and also eliminate a root
cause
of
disorder.
not to theology. The

felt this task belonged to philosophy,
to the magis
demand obedience
already unequivocally
Scriptures
trates. But confused philosophy
had allowed knavish divines to mis
interpret the Scriptures. Once rational men had put civil philosophy
on a sound scientific basis, the proper interpretation
of the Scriptures
Hobbes
would
follow,
and
no man
would
be
able
to
claim,
on
rational
or theo
logical grounds, that he had a right to rebel against proper authority.24

starts with definitions of things that can be known by men.
Hobbes
In his view we can only know what we experience directly or make
ourselves. Thus, the argument of Leviathan starts with an explanation
of sense perception.
starts with
(In theory, of course, his explanation
the properties
of Space, Time, Body,
as given in De
and Motion
x-xi
24
m,
and
Chs.
7-10,
and Conclusion,"
46, 47, and "A Review,
rv, 72-73.
esp. p. 9; 11, ix-xxiv;
esp. pp.
712-14.
See also
1,
The Myth
of Power:
Hobbes's
Leviathan
49
Corpore) Hobbes then proceeds to generate the Leviathan deductively

and from the Leviathan's
from the initial definitions,
generation
thus established
thence to outline its many powers and rights. Having
civil philosophy
(at least by his own notions of science)
scientifically
are
he demonstrates
and the Scriptures
that his civil philosophy
everywhere
mutually
and
supportive,
then
that
the
contem
many
are of the
such absolute
sovereignty
poraries who had undermined
of Darkness.
ideas about absolute
Hobbes's
Kingdom
sovereignty
in his day?they
had been too
could not have been truly "shocking"
often stated by too many eminently reputable men in the past. It was
this method
that was shocking, and certain corollaries of this method
?his
denial of "spirit," his cynicism about the claims of the religious,
for authorities,
his arrogance toward the Universities,
his contempt
his rejection of sentiment, and so on. (This is not to say that his con
"myth" had it not been
temporaries would have all accepted Hobbes's
for his method.
After all, there were several rival "traditions."
The
common lawyers, with their myth of an "immemorial
law," belong in
a medieval
tradition just as much as Hobbes does.25 They would have
authoritarian
system, and indeed they did
quarreled with Hobbes's
so vigorously.)
knew that he could not
But surely, it will be objected, Hobbes
the various antagonists
of his day, that his sys
succeed in persuading
tem was bound to anger and dissatisfy
everyone. I believe so. And I
on Hobbes's
that mordant
believe this recognition
part motivates
irony, that magisterial
despair so many readers sense inHobbes.26 The
whole system is, on one level, a bitter joke. Hobbes
exploits not only
authoritarianism?the
of Medieval
the magic catchwords
Body Pol
he justifies them through a fiction which
itic, the Laws of Nature?but
also exploits all the magic catchwords of the new Libertarians?state
of
nature,
common
property,
social
contract.
In
so doing
he
antago
friends by implicitly
he an
nizes his Royalist
justifying Cromwell,
an
to
their
the
liberty
reducing
absurdity
Independents
by
tagonizes
aristocrats by insisting
from it, he antagonizes
and deriving Monarchy
on total equality before the Law. And he does so with calm sureness?
a rationality all rational men must recognize and respect. That is why
are serious. And there is much more
the ironies are so deadly?they
on
than
just
irony.
going
25See
cf. John Bowie,
Pocock,
pp. 30-69;
26This discussion
of Hobbes's
irony owes
Hobbes
something
and His Critics

(London,
to Mintz,
pp. 34-35
1951).
5o
Alexander
a traditional,
to substitute
I wish somehow
mode
for
habitual
of
Hobbes's
hard
thought
analogical
"literary,"
to banish the philosopher
and intro
nosed mechanistic
nominalism,
duce the poet. Far from it, I would insist on the profound importance
the non
mechanistic
of Hobbes's
logic. I have tried to elucidate
It may
seem
that
in his thinking
assumed
(what I call his
superstructure
as
some
to
of
his
well
habitual
and
indicate
patterns of
"myth");
cause and
matter
and
mechanistic
of
order;
(annihilation
thought
Hobbes's
"uniform
calls
Morris
trend of
S.
Engel
effect, etc.)?what
rational,
mind."27
are
There
philosophers
who
on
concentrate
small
discrete
and
others who build systems.

System-builders
logical problems,
them
with
carry
always a more or less sharply sensed "world
generally
world view which they then proceed to work out in careful
view"?a
detail. They do not, I think, actually begin with a handful of postu
lates and build from them a world view wholly unconceived
prior to
its final revelation. They may organize their philosophical
writings
works are so organized).
But
that way
(all Hobbes's
philosophical
is a matter of rhetoric, not of the thought process.
such organization
As
the field exists first, and the axioms and postulates

I
of the field. In Hobbes's
myth
fundamentally,
descriptions
in geometry,
are,
believe
we
perceive
the
somewhat
unconscious,
somewhat
world his system

field for Hobbes's
thought?the
scribe. It is a world built by analogy, not logic.
27
Engel,
pp.
attempts
irrational
to de
328, 332.
Conatus
as
active
power
in
Hobbes*
JUHANI PIETARINEN
The idea of active power played central role in the 17th Century philosophy and
science. The idea is as follows: if not prevented, bodies necessarily do certain
things in virtue of their power. This kind of thought naturally arose from what
might properly be called the law of persistence, according to which moving bodies continue their motion unchanged if no new external force intervenes.1 What
bodies do in virtue of their power was called actions, and in terms of actions
such things as resistance, pressure and affections were explained. What is this
active power? One of the main aims of philosophers in the 17th and 18th
Centuries was to find a good answer to this question.
I consider here the answer given by Hobbes. It is very important at least in
two respects. First, Spinoza and Leibniz received decisive insights from
Hobbes's developments; in Leibniz's case this has been documented rather well,
but Spinoza seems to owe very much to Hobbes as well, although this has
remained largely unnoticed by Spinoza and Hobbes scholars. Second, the
answer lays the foundation to Hobbes's own philosophy, not only to his physical explanations but also his psychological and political theory. We know that
the latter two rely essentially on the principle of self-preservation or conatusprinciple, and this, as I argue below, derives from his considerations on active
power and the principle of persistence. In virtue of the conatus-principle,
Hobbes's physics, psychology and politics form a unity.
Active and passive power
In the Short Tract (written in the first half of the 1630s) Hobbes defines 'agent'
as a body that has power to move, and 'patient' as a body that has power to be
` I am indebtedto Olli Koistinenfor
many useful commentsand for advisingme about the relevantrecent discussionon dispositions.
' Daniel Garber
prefers to speak of this law as a law of persistencerather than as a law of inertia, because before Newton 'inertia' meant somethingelse than the tendencyof bodies to persist in their motion; see Garber's 'Descartes and Spinoza on persistence and conatus,' Studia
Spinozana 10, 1994, pp. 43-67.
71
moved (ST I, principles 3 and 4). The power of agent is said to be active and the
power of patient passive. For instance, understanding is 'a motion of the animal
spirits, by the action of the brayne, qualified with the active power of the externall object' (ST III, conclusion 6), so that 'understanding (as a power) is a passive power in the animal spirits to be moved by the action of the brayne' (corollary to conclusion 6). What does Hobbes mean by active power?
Principle 9 of the first section states: 'Whatsoever moveth another, moveth
it either by active power inherent in it self or by motion received from another.'
In the third section we find the proof that nothing can move itself (conclusion
10). The same important statement appears also in the manuscript catalogued
among the Classified Papers of the Royal Society: 'There is nothing, yt can give
a beginning of motion to itself. All determinations must proceed from some
other movements.'2 In De Corpore the principle is stated as follows:
'Whatsoever is at rest, will always be at rest, unless there be some other body
besides it, which, by endeavouring to get in its place by motion, suffers it no
longer to remain at rest' (11.8.19). Hobbes denies clearly that active power could
be anything like a capacity of bodies to initiate their actions; it is not self-causing power.
But if bodies receive their motions from other bodies, are they not entirely
passive? What point is there to say that the brain has active power, when external objects determine its motions? To put it briefly, Hobbes's idea seems to be
this: when the brain, affected by the power of external objects, acts on animal
spirits, it does not just let the externally caused motion to pass on but reacts to
it, and how it reacts depends on its own power. However, as a mere reaction to
external influence, the brain shows only its passive part, and to learn to know
the active power we have to look for causal effects of the brain on other bodies,
that is, how it acts on them. Both actions and reactions depend on the nature or
constitution of things. Let us see how this kind of explanation is developed in
Hobbes.
Hobbes vs. Descartes

In De Corpore Hobbes explains that the power of the agent and the efficient
cause are the same thing except that 'cause respects the past, power the future
time' (X.1 ). The term 'cause' refers to something that can be identified or
explained by means of observed effects, and the term 'power' to what a thing is
capable of doing, to what it will do in certain specified circumstances. In other
2This is
quoted from Douglas Jesseph's 'Hobbes and the method of natural science,' in Tom
Sorell (ed.), The Cambridge Companionto Hobbes, CambridgeUniversityPress, 1996; see p.
90.
72
words, power should be understood as a disposition notion. But what does it

mean? Long before writing De Corpore, Hobbes became involved in a serious
controversy with Descartes on this question.'
Hobbes could not accept Descartes's view that 'it is necessary to distinguish
between movement, and the action or inclination to move,' as Descartes stated
his position in the Discourse on the Method ( 1637). 'Here we disagree: for what
he calls tendency or action, I call motion, what he distinguishes from motion, I
want to call motion,' he writes in an early Latin treatise on optics.' His main
argument against Descartes is that if inclinations are taken to be actions, as
Descartes does, they must be motions. His definite point is that 'all action is
motion' (1.10), and the same point appears in the Tractatus opticus:5 'Every
action is local motion in the agent' (hypothesis 1 ). Hobbes therefore concludes
that inclination as action must be 'really and properly' motion, and that
Descartes, understanding by inclination the mere possibility of motion, 'admits
that inclination is not motion ... and therefore not action' (1 13).
One important issue in the controversy was the explanation of pressure.
According to Hobbes, we cannot understand pressure unless we think that inclinations are actual motions, for pressure is generated when a body is forced out
of its place by another (1.10; also DCo XV.2). Take an example (not Hobbes's
own). A billiard ball exercises pressure on the surface of the table on which it is
lying, and if the table collapses, the ball falls down. Hobbes's explanation is that
the ball must move downwards all the time when it is lying on the table, and
when the table collapses, the ball continues the motion already begun. Indeed,
the inclination to move must be understood as the very beginning or the first part
of the downward motion. Hobbes thus concludes that inclination is 'truly and
properly speaking motion, although slight, for it is the beginning of motion or
its first part, but a part of motion is motion' (1 13). In his letter to Mersenne in
February 1641 Descartes rejects Hobbes's reasoning that actions conceived as
inclinations are motions:
I Brian Stoffel's 'Hobbes's conatus and the roots of character'

gives a detailed descriptionand
very useful analysis of the controversy;in C. Waltonand P. J. Johnson(eds),Hobbes's Science
of Natural Justice, MartinusNijhoff, 1987.
4 Partsof the treatiseare printed as appendixII of F. Tonnies's edition of TheElementsofLaw;
the quotation is from the first chapter, 10.Fritiof Brand dates this treatise between 1644-46,
but Hobbes must have developedhis criticism against Descartes around 1640 at the latest, for
Descartesreplies to it in his letter to Mersennein 1641.
5 This was
published as book 7 of Mersenne's Universaegeometriae synopsis(1644), and it
also reflects the exchangebetween Descartes and Hobbes.
6 Alreadyin the Short Tract, action is defined as motion: 'In locall motion, the action of the
agent, is the locall motion of the patient' (ST I, principle 10). Here action is defined as the
result and not, as in the later works, the process of an agent's doing.
73
He makes a false assumption when he says that 'all action is local motion'. For when I
press, for example, with a stick against the ground, the action of my hand is communicated to the whole of that stick, and is transmittedas far as the ground, even though we
do not suppose in the slightest that the stick is moved - not even indiscemibly,as he goes
on to assume.'
finds Hobbes's reason for the claim that inclination is motion
'extremely feeble': Hobbes argues that the beginning of motion must be motion,
but, Descartes asks, 'who granted him that inclination was the beginning or a
part of motion?' (ibid. p. 91).
This indicates that Descartes did not take seriously Hobbes's suggestion for
explaining pressure by means of actual motions. He rejected it with considerable arrogance, as the exchange shows. In contrast to Descartes's attitude, young
Leibniz greeted Hobbes's ideas with enthusiasm thirty years later.8 He accepted
the idea of endeavor as the beginning of motion and developed it further.
Descartes
Descartes's
phenomenalism
Descartes, apparently trying to avoid all reference to 'occult' qualities in

physics, rejected the idea that material things have any kind of active power. If
we talk about the power of a body to resist or move another body, all we can
legitimately imply is that bodies have certain kinds of tendencies. He is very
explicit about this in the Principles of Philosophy ( 1644):
Here we must carefullynote that the force each body has to act on another or to resist the
action of another consists in this one thing, that each and every thing tends, insofar as it
is in itself, to remain in the same state in which it is, in accordancewith the law posited
in the first place (PP 11.43).
The law to which Descartes refers is that 'each thing, insofar as it is in itself,
always remains in the same state, and that consequently, when it is once moved,
it always continues to move' (PP 11.37). Thus, granted that the condition 'insofar as it is in itself' means 'insofar as it is not prevented by external causes',
Descartes's idea of tendency may be stated as a simple conditional statement:'
' Letter 32 in Noel Malcolm (ed.), The Correspondenceof ThomasHobbes, ClarendonPress,

1994.
8Letter to Hobbes,
July 1670; letter 189 in Malcolm's edition.
9 Della Rocca
gives a useful analysis of Descartes's notion of tendency in 'Spinoza's metaphysicalpsychology,' inDon Garrett (ed.), The CambridgeCompanionto Spinoza,Cambridge
UniversityPress, 1996; see pp. 194-97.
74
(1)
X has a tendency to do A = if X is not prevented by external causes,

then X does A.
As an analysis of power this is not satisfactory, as Leibniz immediately

noticed. If nothing else is granted than that moving bodies will continue to move
if not prevented, we cannot explain such things as persistence, pressure and
causal actions. 'It is one thing to retain a state until something changes it, ... and
quite another thing, much more significant, for a thing not to be indifferent, but
to have a force and, as it were, an inclination to retain its state, and so resist
changing.' "' This brings Descartes's failure into daylight: bodies cannot get any
causal efficiency merely from the fact that they obey the law of persistence and
other laws of motion formulated by Descartes. The notion of tendency, as
Descartes analyzed it, is too weak to explain such things as causal efficiency,
resistance to change, and pressure.
Leibniz's criticism confirms what Hobbes had said earlier, namely that
Descartes failed to explain actions of bodies. Descartes himself assumes, at least
in his later writings, that actions involve causal relations: '[W]hatever takes
place or occurs is generally called by philosophers a 'passion' with regard to the
subject to which it happens and an 'action' with regard to that which makes it
happen' (The Passions of the Soul I.1 ). Hobbes is right: Descartes's notion of
tendency does not have explanatory power with respect to actions of bodies.
Descartes's attempt to avoid using the notion of power in physical explanations is reminiscent of similar efforts of the 20th Century positivists." I They
favored, for instance, the 'phenomenalist' analysis of disposition terms where no
assumption is made of the nature or structure of things that are said to have disposition properties, but the content of such terms is taken to be fully analyzable
by conditional statements like (1) above. Unlike positivists, however, Descartes
retained the idea of power in the non-material realm: God has infinite power of
thought and moves by it material bodies in accordance with the immutable laws
of nature. But as Leibniz noticed, this will not do. To explain causal phenomena - actions, in effect - we have to assume that bodies have power in themselves, 'for we can show that extension without adding other qualities is not
capable of action and passive reception.''2
"' Leibniz's letter to DeVolder;the

quotationis from Daniel Garber's 'Descartes and Spinoza
on Persistenceand Conatus,'Studia Spinozana 10, 1994; see p. 47
" Rom Harr6 remarks of this
similarity in his important paper 'Powers,' British Journal of
Philosophyof Science21, 1970; see p. 83.
'2 P. P. Weiner(ed.), Leibniz:Selections(Scribner's,New York 1951);see pp. 62-3.
75
Hobbes's notion of endeavor

What, then, is involved in Hobbes's view that inclinations are invisible beginnings of local motions?
The first notable thing is that inclinations are explained in terms of non-dispositional real properties or states of bodies. In other words, Hobbes's idea seems
to be that inclinations or 'endeavours', as he called them in his later works," cannot be analyzed correctly without assuming something about the intrinsic states
of bodies. The idea may be expressed as follows:
(2)
X endeavors to A = if X is not prevented by external causes, then X does

A in virtue of its intrinsic state.
This is a long leap from Descartes's phenomenalism towards a more realistic

view of dispositional properties, that is, to a view that such properties have a nondispositional really occurrent basis in the objects to which they are ascribed.
However, we cannot call Hobbes a realist in the sense of David Armstrong
and John Mackie. '? Were he a realist, he should think that the event that X does
A is caused by the intrinsic state of X together with the condition that X is not
prevented, taking the causal relation to be contingent in the Humean sense. For
instance, for a realist the breaking of a fragile thing is a contingent causal consequence of the molecular structure of the thing and its being shattered. Hobbes,
however, did not think that when X endeavors to A, the invisible motions are just
contingently related to the fact that X does A if nothing is preventing, for he
thought that causal relations are conceptually necessary. When an effect occurs,
Hobbes argues, its 'entire' cause must be present, and when it is 'supposed to be
present, it cannot be understood but that the effect is produced at the same
instant' (DCo IX.3). Descartes and Spinoza understood causality in the same way
as well: that Y is caused by X means that Y follows necessarily from X if nothing prevents, where 'following necessarily' has the implication that we cannot
even conceive of Y without X. This implies strict determinism, as is clearly
expressed in Hobbes's saying that 'what shall be, shall be, is as necessary a
proposition as this, a man is a man' (Dco X.V; italics original).
We may restate Hobbes's argument that inclinations must be actual slight
motions of bodies as follows. When the table suddenly collapses, the ball falls
" For instance, in the Elements of Law he speaks of 'the endeavouror internal beginning of
animal motion' (1.7.2),and in the Leviathan he writes that the 'small beginnings of motion,
within the body of man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible
actions, are commonlycalled endeavour' (Chapter6).
" See Mackie's
thorough discussion on three different views of dispositions in his Truth,
Probability and Paradox, chapter 4 'Dispositionsand powers' (ClarendonPress, 1973).
76
down, and because the falling is a local motion of the ball, it must have a beginning and the beginning must have a cause. However, the cause of the ball's falling
cannot be the table's collapsing but something that existed before it, so that the
local motion must have begun already before the collapsing. The beginning of
this motion is the inclination or endeavor of the ball to fall down; it is a small
movement by which the ball pushes the table out of balance, and this explains the
pressure of the ball against the table. When the table collapses, the ball continues
the already started motion.
We may notice from this reasoning that it relies on the same law of persistence to which Descartes appeals in explaining his notion of tendency, namely
that bodies will continue their present motion if no other body causes a change.
Hobbes gives an a priori reason for the law by appealing to the principle of sufficient reason: 'For if we suppose nothing to be without it, there will be no reason why it should rest now, rather that at another time; wherefore its motion
would cease in every particle of time alike; which is not intelligible' (DCo
VIII. 19). Because this law is a conceptual truth in Hobbes, so is the hypothetical
truth in (2), and this does not accord with a realist interpretation of the dispositional notion 'endeavouring'.
Hobbes offers a general definition of the notion in De Corpore:
I define endeavourto be motionmade in less space and time than can be given;that is, less
than can be determinedor assignedby expositionor number;that is, motion made through
the length of a point, and in an instant or point of time (XV.2).
It is interesting to note that here endeavor does not mean just the beginning of a
local motion but any indefinitely small motion. That a body X endeavors to do
something does not only mean that it has begun to move but also that it continues its motion if nothing is changed in the environment. Another interesting thing
is Hobbes's conclusion that 'all endeavour, whether it be in empty or in full
space, proceeds not only to any distance, how great soever, but also in any time,
how little soever, that is, in an instant' (DCo XV.7). This is so because every
endeavor is a motion by which a body displaces another body wich does the same
to the next, and so on. Thus Hobbes arrived to the view that for every causal
process there must be the very first beginning, and these beginnings fix all
motions in the universe. The universe consists of actual local motions and these
in turn of imperceptibly small motions; there are no merely possible motions or
actions.
Hobbes is remarkably rationalist in his reasoning: "Nor makes it any matter,
that endeavour, by proceeding, grows weaker and weaker, till at last it can no
longer be perceived by sense; for motion may be insensible; and I do not here
examine things by sense and experience, but by reason" (Dco XV.7).
77
Endeavor
as active power
In De Corpore Hobbes identifies active power with efficient cause with the difference that 'cause is so called in respect to the effect already produced, and
power in respect to the effect to be produced hereafter; so that cause respects the
past, power the future time' (X.1). Active power is a disposition of bodies to produce effects, that is, their endeavor to move other bodies in some determinate
way. Hobbes equates active power with the endeavoring of bodies.
This equation is very important, for it led Hobbes to consider active power
as the nature or essence of things. Hobbes did not develop this idea systematically, but for Spinoza and Leibniz it turned out to become crucial. In De
Corpore Hobbes writes:
'[T]he beginningof individuationis not always to be taken either from the matter alone,
or from form alone. But we must consider what name anythingis called, when we inquire
concerningthe identityof it. [I]f the name be given for such form as is the beginning of
motion, then, as long as that motion remains, it will be the same individualthing; as that
man will be always the same, whose actions and thoughts proceed all from the same
beginningof motion, namely,that which was in his generation; and that will be the same
river which flows from one and the same fountain,whetherthe same water,or other water,
or something else than water, flow from thence; and that the same city, whose acts proceed continuallyfrom the same institution,whether the men be the same or not' (H. 11.7).
The identity of an individual thing consists of the motion by which its existence
begins; a body is the same individual as long as its initial motion remains. In
other words, the essence of things consists of their initial motion. But when we
consider the beginning of motion as the endeavor, and when the endeavor is
identified with active power, the conclusion follows that the essence of things
consists of the power they have when they come into existence. Let us call it the
inherent power of things.
Hobbes never records this kind of inference anywhere, nor states explicitly
that the essence of things is their inherent power, but some evidence for such
thinking can be gathered from what he writes. In De Corpore he explains how
a bent crossbow tends to restore itself, because the 'endeavour or motion of [its]
internal parts, by which they were able to recover their former places or situations, was not extinguished' (XXII. 18). When bent, the bow endeavors to return
to the posture it had before, and when the force keeping it bent is removed, it
necessarily does so. Hobbes says that it has an 'appetite' for restitution, that is,
it endeavors to preserve its nature. If the crossbow 'remains a long time bent, it
will get such a habit, that when it is loosed and left to its own freedom, it will
not only not restore itself, but will require as much force for the bringing of it
back to its first posture, as did for the bending of it at the first' (XXII.2050). The
78
bow acquires a new 'habit' (habitus), a new essence that is, and it ceases to be
a bow. In the Decameron Physiologicum (1674) Hobbes explains:
[T]he smallest parts of a hard body have everyone,by the generation of hardness, a circular, or other compound motion; such motion is that of the smallest parts of the bow.
Which circles in the bending you press into an ellipsis, and an ellipsis into a narrowerbut
longer ellipsis with violence; which turns their natural motion against the outward parts
of the bow, and in an endeavourto stretch the bow into its former posture.15
This is Hobbes's explanation for the structural nature of material things: they
consist of certain smallest parts, each having a characteristic initial motion, and
the endeavor or inherent power of bodies consists of the initial motions of these
parts. Individual things preserve their identity as long as they have this inherent
power, and similarly their existence depends on it.
The most important idea here is that by the inherent power individuals are
compelled to self-preservation. In this way Hobbes arrives to what may be
called the general conatus-principle:
Every thing endeavorsto preserve its own existenceas far as it can by its own power.
The principle has a crucial role in Hobbes's political philosophy. In De Cive
Hobbes writes that 'the first foundation of natural right is this, that every man as
much as in him lies endeavour to protect his life and members' (1.7; italics original). Hobbes clearly thinks that the principle is a general natural law in the same
sense as the law of persistence is an eternal and immutable law of nature. He
writes: 'For every man is desirous of what is good for him, and shuns what is evil,
but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death; and this he doth by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward'
(ibid.). Political individuals can be treated, Hobbes thinks, like any other bodies,
and the explanation of the motion of bodies should be based on the same notion
of active power or endeavor both in physics and in politics. Spinoza adopted
essentially the same reasoning, and the conatus-principle established in the third
part of the Ethics constitutes the foundation of his psychology and politics as well.
Hobbes clearly read the idea of physical power or force into his notion of
endeavor. He defines resistance as 'the endeavour of a moved body X either wholly or in part contrary to the endeavour of another moved body Y which touches it,'
and a body presses another when 'with its endeavour it makes either all or part of
the other body to go out of its place' (DCo XV.2). Most explicitly, physical force
15
English WorksVII,p. 135.
79
is defined in terms of impetus that is 'nothing else but the quantity or velocity of
But if the endeavor is nothing but motion obeying the law of
endeavour'
persistence, the same criticism that Leibniz leveled at Descartes's attempt to
explain physical power as the tendency of bodies to remain in a given state applies
here, too. If endeavors are considered just as motions, bodies are not able to resist
or press each other merely in virtue of them. Leibniz did not say this of Hobbes's
reasoning, but he saw the problem and made certain important developments.
Leibniz realized the importance of Hobbes's idea of endeavor as a point-like
entity and the idea that bodies are structures of the endeavors of their simplest
parts. But because simplest parts cannot be divisible, they cannot be extensional,
and Leibniz made the ingenious conclusion that the endeavors must be non-extensional 'power points' that occupy a certain region in the space, and this idea was
decisive for his philosophical work, as he wrote to Amauld in November 167 1. 17
Leibniz corrected the fatal mistake of Hobbes: to be useful in the explanation of
physical phenomena, the notion of power must not be defined in terms of motion;
these two are entirely different kinds of things. Ironically enough, on this point
Leibniz supported Descartes against Hobbes, but as already mentioned, he rejected Descartes's conclusion that material things as such are totally powerless.
Active and passive dispositions
'
In spite of the failure of explaining the nature of power, Hobbes's idea that the
endeavoring of bodies is inherent power was an important achievement. How
bodies behave in actual circumstances depends on their structural nature consisting of power-like entities. Thus the analysis (2) of 'endeavors' as dispositions can be generalized as follows:
(3)
X endeavors to A = if X is not prevented by external causes, then X

does A in virtue of its intrinsic nature or essence.
Similarly, because the essence of things is their power, we get:

(4)
X endeavors to A = if X is not prevented by external causes, then X

does A in virtue of its inherent power.
'fi
Accordingto Howard Bernstein,Hobbes's endeavor 'is a common ancestorof two very different ways of conceptualizing"force", that is, of Newton's dynamica and Leibniz's dynamice' (HowardR. Bernstein, 'Conatus, Hobbes, and the YoungLeibniz,' Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 11, 1980, p. 26).
" Bernstein
(op.cit.) gives interesting evidence about the importance of Hobbes's idea of
endeavorto Leibniz's physical and philosophicalwork.
80
We have seen that causal relations are for Hobbes non-contingent, which
implies that the power of things is non-contingently related to what they do in
virtue of it. If X has power to cause event E, then in suitable circumstances E
will be necessarily produced by X, otherwise we would not claim X to have the
power. Hobbes says that 'every act, that shall be produced, shall necessarily be
produced; for, that it shall not be produced, is impossible; because ... every possible act shall at some time be produced' (DCo X.5 ; the term 'act' refers to what
is produced by the power, i.e. to the passive counterpart of power). Thus Hobbes
represents what Mackie tellingly calls the rationalist view of dispositions.'8
Hobbes makes extensive use of the explanatory pattern involved in (3) and
(4). Consider for instance his explanation of thoughts and emotions. The inherent power or essence of human individuals (and other individual animals) consists of certain kinds of 'vital motions' that are motions 'begun in generation and
continued without interruption through their whole life' (Leviathan VI, 1 ). In
the Elements of Law (2.8) Hobbes describes how the vital motions of the brain
exhibit such power when they are acted on by externally caused motions
through the nerves: the brain resists such motions by its own vital motion, and
becomes affected by them. The affections are changes in the inherent power of
the brain, and we experience such affections as thoughts. The affected brain in
turn sends motions through the nerves to the heart where an affection arises
through the resistance of the heart's vital motion, and we experience such affections as emotions. All actions and passions of bodies are explained in the similar way: body X exercises its power on body Y whenever X makes a change in
or affects the inherent power of Y, so that the affection depends on both the
nature of X and the nature of Y. X exhibits active, and Y passive power: 'the
power of the agent is that which is commonly called active power,' and the passive power 'is the power of the patient' (DCo X.1).
Rom Harr6 has revived this kind of distinction and argues for its relevance
to the analysis of disposition terms in causal explanations." He associates the
term 'power' with agency, 'with the initiation of trains of events,' and the term
'liability' or 'passive power' with a disposition to suffer change in virtue of the
essential nature of things. Such properties as solubility, inflammability, brittleness etc. are liabilities rather than powers, but usually things have both powers
and liabilities. 'The concepts of power and liability are the poles of a spectrum
of concepts, distinguished by the relative degree to which we assign responsibility for particular behaviour between intrinsic conditions and external circum-
`8
Op.cit.,p. 142.Mackie arguesthat the rationalistview shouldbe rejectedin favor of the realist view.
19Harr6, cit., 87.
op.
p.
81
stances,' Harr6 says, and 'to ascribe a power is to say that when any of a certain
specific kind of phenomenon occurs the intrinsic nature of the things involved
are in more or less measure responsible for that phenomenon occurring' (p. 88).
Haff6 seems to take the rationalist stand that the relation between the behavior
of things and their inherent power should be taken to be conceptual and not
causal in the Humean contingent sense. This indeed would be in agreement with
Hobbes and the 17th Century rationalism. We cannot say, however, that Haff6
has justified the rationalist view of dispositions, for his argument is open to
severe criticism, as pointed out by John Mackie.2 But this matter need not concern us here.
2Mackie,
op. cit., pp. 138-39.
82

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Hobbes's Theory of Real Power

& Civil Order

The final word in the interpretationof a great political thinker

HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

revolution and moral crisis,

HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

tion brought about in the patient-will be determined, not by the

Ibid., pp. 211, 344-45.

Century-Crofts, 1949), Ch.

No. i, for an example of the use he made of

HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

tional natureof power, certaincommentatorshave criticizedhim on the

have power, nor can the accidentswhich are in them severally,be

HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

than they are "esteemed by others."21Such characteristicscame into

Elements, pp. 211, 344-45.

or increase what is encompassedby their individual egos. There is an

sence of common power men deteriorateinto the "naturalcondition of

same.... Desire of knowledge, and arts of peace, inclineth men

Desire of fame after death does the same.27

These desires and aversions, coupled with reason, comprisea reservoir

Leviathan, pp. 83, 144.

HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

ment, or with ignominy"28-which are analogous, Hobbes reasons, to

Ibid., Ch. 18.

versive doctrines were introduced among them by designing men.

De Cive, LamprechtEdition, pp. 9-1o.

6Ibid., Chs. 1-8.

HOBBES S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

aspect of man's organizedlife, a necessary conditionfor the occurrence

ments of speech")44of basic political relationships,if public orderis to

and De Cive, Ch. 12, No. I.

HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

after."No contractor covenant, even when acceptedsincerelyfrom the

In short, coercive power may provide an important, an indispensable

5 Ibid., pp. 89, 94.

Ibid., Ch. 23.

against those who advocate views of limited public authority,warning

HOBBES'S THEORY OF POWER AND ORDER

THOMAS HOBBES A N D T H E CONSTITUENT POWER

H. Pitkin, HobbessConcept of Representation, American Political Science Review, 58 (1964),

tation in Leviathan because in order to denote his conception of the essence of

THOMAS HOBBES A N D THE CONSTITUENT POWER

multitude of subjects which are g~verned.~

unreservedly to one man-originally the Roman Republic surrendering its

THOMAS HOBBES A N D THE CONSTITUENT P O W E R

A single source of actions, or ego-something of which one can say little

of representation, with its implication of a latent group p e r ~ o n a l i t y in~ ~the

seems clear enough. However in the

representer is now but one possible way by which a sovereign power is

monarchy, democracy, or aristocracy. He added that it is manifest, that men

Sieyess concept of mediate unanimity helps to illuminate Hobbess doctrine

could be made by single individuals, or by many together by plurality of

ThomasHobbes:Powerin the Stateof Nature,

ThomasHobbesmaynot be thefirstpowertheoristin thehistoryof

It is often taken for grantedthat Hobbes has a zero-sumunderstanding

506 Powerin the Stateof Nature

altogether obvious, since Hobbes himself, in the second of the two

JamesH. Read 507

508 PowerintheStateof Nature

Letus beginby recallingHobbes'smostgeneraldefinitionof poweras

8. Ibid., Ch. 13, p. 184.

510 Powerin the Stateof Nature

11. Leviathan, Ch. 13, p. 186.