Meghan Alyssa Robison

Hobbes's justification for original maternal dominion is often evaluated in connection to the ambiguous status of women in his political thought. Many feminist interpreters explain this ambiguity as a contradiction: following Carole Pateman, they see maternal dominion as one term of the “paradox of parental power.” The first aim of this article is to elaborate a second, alternative approach within some critical responses to Pateman's reading. Rather than as one part of a contradiction, in these interpretations maternal dominion emerges as a self-standing form of authority that is very different from patriarchal domination. By offering a new synthesis of some of these interpretations, I aim to show this second view as more comprehensive and compelling than that offered by Pateman. Then, building upon this view, I give a new reading of the concept of preservation that establishes the mother's dominion as an intersubjective practice that reflects an awareness about the interdependent conditions for human well-being and, hence, challenges the standard approach to Hobbesian individualism and sovereign power. Finally, drawing from my interpretation of preservation, I offer a new way to understand Hobbes's argument that “parental authority is derived from the child's consent.”

This essay examines Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops from “Expansion and the Philosophy of Power” (1946) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Human Condition (1958) by focusing on the role of the concept of process, and the reductive concept of life as “the life-process” in order to highlight an important way in which Arendt sees Hobbes as contributing to the valorization of the life-process in modernity. By reconstructing Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops in these texts, I aim to expand our understanding of Hobbes’s importance for Arendt’s analysis of modernity by showing that Hobbes is not only the philosopher of an original “expansionist” concept of power and a political-economic imperialist state but also, on account of the centrality of the notion of process within it, key to the elevation of life as the highest value in the modern vita activa.

Power is widely acknowledged as central to Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy. There is ongoing debate over whether singular human beings or, instead, plural relationships, are the true source of power. After tracing the debate between the individualist and relationist interpretations, I offer an alternative option which, I argue, can accommodate both the individual and the relation together. Hobbesian power, I contend, is an appearance of a human being as having a means to satisfy his desires and, hence, while power belongs to an individual, it only appears in relation to another who recognizes him as such. In closing, I reflect on the political implications of this notion of power in connection with desire.