Mariana Oliveira

Hobbes’s account of the sovereign’s right to punish in Leviathan has led to a longstanding interpretive dispute. The debate is prompted by the fact that, prima facie, Hobbes makes two inconsistent claims: subjects (i) authorize all the acts of the sovereign, and are hence authors of their own punishment, yet (ii) have the liberty to resist such punishment. I argue that attending to Hobbes’s surprisingly neglected account of power yields a novel interpretation of his theory of punishment. Hobbes, it turns out, is working with two conceptions of power: potestas, a juridical power, and potentia, a factual power. Each power grounds one of the ‘inconsistent’ claims above: potestas founds the authorized condemnation by the legal system, and potentia the factual enforced penalty, which is not directly authorized and can be resisted.

Thomas Hobbes’s most important recommendations for a sovereign reader concerned the governing of opinion. Due to the spread of false doctrines and their powerful champions, Hobbes was afraid that subjects would have opinions contrary to the maintenance of peace. His solution comprehended a combination of civic education and censorship. This text explains how Hobbes justifies his recommendations from the perspective of individual deliberation. It argues that Hobbes conceived censoring circulating doctrines as a way of keeping subjects’ minds like clean paper, ready for the sovereign to imprint civil doctrine in them through teaching, thereby increasing the chances of influencing subjects’ (free) deliberation, and thus of producing obedience.

O artigo argumenta que a teoria dos poderes políticos de Thomas Hobbes no Leviatã é inovadora, consistente e muito bem integrada no debate da época e em sua filosofia política. Essa teoria se revela na versão latina do Leviatã com a inserção pelo autor do binômio da potentia e da potestas, que traduz a palavra power, tornando explícita uma distinção que antes poderia ser compreendida apenas analiticamente. O uso dos dois conceitos por Hobbes é um tema pouco explorado pela literatura e, mesmo aqueles e aquelas especialistas que tratam do binômio não interpretam adequadamente o texto hobbesiano nem oferecem uma contextualização do tema no debate da época. O presente artigo busca preencher essa lacuna.