Liberty and Leviathan
32 Pages Posted: 5 Oct 2004
Abstract
Hobbes persuaded later, if not immediate, successors that it is only the exercise of a power of interference that reduces people's freedom, not its (unexercised) existence - not even its existence in an arbitrary, unchecked form. And equally he persuaded them that the exercise of a power of interference always reduces freedom in the same way, whether it occur in a republican democracy, purportedly on a "non-arbitrary" basis, or under an dictatorial, arbitrary regime. But those propositions were defended in Hobbes's case on a very different basis from any that would have appealed to successors. That claim is documented on the basis of a distinction in Hobbes's work between freedom as non-commitment, of which freedom as non-obligation is the principal variety, and freedom as non-obstruction.
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