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The Problem of Power in Hobbes’s Leviathan ― Focusing on the Relation between Natural Power and Political Power ―

Byung-Chul So 1

1고려대학교

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ABSTRACT

In contemporary global world which may be likened to a sort of ‘supernational state of nature’, we see the tyranny of colossal capital, cultural imperialism, the gulf between rich and poor, etc. prevailing in a chaotic dynamics. In this situation Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the State as the product of social contract to escape the state of nature has a considerable significance, for its rational regulation principle of the ‘control of natural power by political one’ could provide us a realistic and substantially useful normative vision of global political order which could prevent and control the irrationalities of globalization. It never injures the self-identity of modern human subject who has taken the pursuit of such an egoistic purpose as the maximization of self-interest for granted because it finds the motive for us to control natural power, not in such an exogenous principle as divine command, but in human comfortable self-preservation as original purpose of that power and human reason as instrumental function for achieving it. But this current significance of Hobbes’s theory of the State can be recognized only within the restricted range, for in a strict sense it is not a ‘moral’ response but a ‘political’ one to the state of nature, and so it can justify the peaceful global order which we need, only as the result of not moral philanthropy but political association. The greatest defect in this realistic position is that it cannot appeal to a certain ‘moral’ authority to make egoistic individuals abide by the social contract which they have just concluded. Hence, we cannot make a consistently rational person in the instrumental sense fulfill a Hobbesian social contract without fail, although we can make such a contract with him. To solve this problem is a key point of global political effort to grope for the possibilities of a peaceful global order. But in order to solve it radically, we must make various enlightening efforts to complement the unstable motivation effect of ‘instrumental morality in accordance with self-interest’(Hobbesian morality) with globally aroused sympathy with the fundamental validity of ‘autonomous morality without regard to self-interest’(Kantian morality).

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