POL 2108 Study Guide - Empiricism, Deontological Ethics, Scientific Method
10 Jul 2014
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Wanted to find a grounding for political obligation. Individual citizens give up their rights to the leviathan in exchange for peace. Hobbes is not what we would call a liberal, but very much lays the foundation for liberalism. The individual plays a big role for hobbes. Take economic man (market individual) and take those psychological attributes and place them back into the state of nature. In hobbes we see the legitimization of the pursuit of personal interest. How can we construct society to accommodate this. Machiavelli"s prescriptions were lacking in one area -> some comprehensive principle for coping with the interest ridden nature of the new politics. For hobbes the one thing that a political authority cannot do is to take your life. Sense of a common life was absent from machiavelli. No reflection of an ordered set of relationships among men of a same social group.
