Under His Command: Desire & Domination Volume 1

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In seeming contrast to this egalitarian foundation, Hobbes spoke of the commonwealth in patriarchal language. Hobbes justifies this way of talking by saying that it is fathers not mothers who have founded societies. Such debates raise the question: To what extent are the patriarchal claims Hobbes makes integral to his overall theory, if indeed they are integral at all? Very helpful for further reference is the critical bibliography of Hobbes scholarship to contained in Zagorin, P.

Major Political Writings 2. The Philosophical Project 3. The State of Nature 4. Further Questions About the State of Nature 6. The Laws of Nature 7. Establishing Sovereign Authority 8. The Limits of Political Obligation Religion and Social Instability The Philosophical Project Hobbes sought to discover rational principles for the construction of a civil polity that would not be subject to destruction from within. The State of Nature To establish these conclusions, Hobbes invites us to consider what life would be like in a state of nature, that is, a condition without government.

The State of Nature Is a State of War Taken together, these plausible descriptive and normative assumptions yield a state of nature potentially fraught with divisive struggle. Further Questions About the State of Nature In response to the natural question whether humanity ever was generally in any such state of nature, Hobbes gives three examples of putative states of nature. The Laws of Nature Hobbes argues that the state of nature is a miserable state of war in which none of our important human ends are reliably realizable.

Absolutism Although Hobbes offered some mild pragmatic grounds for preferring monarchy to other forms of government, his main concern was to argue that effective government—whatever its form—must have absolute authority. Hobbes on Women and the Family Scholars are increasingly interested in how Hobbes thought of the status of women, and of the family.

2. Who, or What, Can Dominate?

Harvard University Press, contains important papers by A. Watkins, Howard Warrender, and John Plamenatz, among others. University of Kansas Press. Pennsylvania State University Press. Insights for the 21st Century , Cambridge: Books and Articles Abizadeh, A. University of Chicago Press. Columbia University Press Green, M. University of British Columbia Press. Essays for Gregory Kavka , J.

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Cases in the Law of Nature , Cambridge: Hobbes to Locke , Oxford: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics , Cambridge: A Biography , Cambridge: Hobbes on Law and International Affairs , Oxford: Hobbes on Civil Association , Oxford: This is how real dominators are distinct from deluded claimants to normative power. Imagine a mob boss who comes to believe that he speaks for God.

Similarly, Forst measures dominating power against an explicitly moralized baseline—power dominates to the extent that it is exercised outside a structure of democratic institutions designed to secure and respect the equal authority of each citizen to offer and receive adequate justifications Forst Noumenal power within social relationships becomes domination when agents within that relationship are denied their right to justification: One way is simply through the threat of violence.

If a mob boss has all the guns and muscle, he will be able to crowd the shop owner completely out of the justificatory space.

What the shop owner might believe about what they have reason to think and do is irrelevant, given the price they will pay for non-compliance. Again, if we understand the power required for domination as a kind of authority, it makes sense to diagnose the presence or absence of domination in terms of illicit authority.

When illicit normative authority counts as such because it is claimed by a powerful few, we are pushed firmly in the direction of a reckoning with the normative authority of all. Of course, once this reckoning has begun, it is natural to diagnose domination in broadly Kantian terms as the absence of institutions securing respect for our autonomy. See Bohman for a similar approach applied to international relations. Norm-dependent or moralized theories identify domination with some varieties of unrestrained asymmetric power and not others, whether it be power to dictate the norms of a social relationship, to establish legitimizing narratives, to alter the shape of our supposed rights and duties, to close us off from the space of reasons, to violate our basic interests, or to do us wrong.

This makes them more vulnerable to the possibility that domination can take some form not captured by any of these specific powers. He recommends we see some of the powers highlighted by moralized or norm-dependent theories as varieties of domination, but remain alert to other forms it might assume. Because power asymmetries persist in other contexts outside the traditionally political, the idea of domination has been marshaled beyond political philosophy in applied ethics.

Anti-domination approaches have an ecumenical appeal. Few deny that the paradigms are examples of injustice; thus, to show that some power structure or use of power resembles these paradigms goes a long way toward motivating a verdict against them. Awareness of domination also draws our attention to the ways moral wrong can be manifest outside the limits of individual actions.

Aside from questions about which individual actions are wrong, other questions become important. Who is empowered to act in what ways? How are potential victims empowered to resist? Who is vulnerable even if not actually victimized? However benevolent, who makes the rules? Who obeys or refuses to obey, and what does their compliance or refusal cost them? How do the actions of those with more power construct the space where the less powerful or the powerless must act?

Medical care or the failure to provide it is rife with potential for domination. Workers often have little say in the conditions or culture of their workplaces Gourevitch ; Breen ; Anderson Migrant and immigrant populations usually exist in political limbo where they are deeply vulnerable to exploitation and have no legal standing to contest their treatment Honohan ; Costa ; Sager The consumption habits of wealthy nations shape a global environment in which all humans now and for the foreseeable future will make their choices Bohman ; Nolt ; Smith ; Smith ; Katz Most deployment of anti-domination arguments applies neorepublican theories of domination, but there are important exceptions.

In these cases, the sick may be vulnerable to domination not because someone acts intentionally to interfere with their choices—e. In a more dramatic departure, Corey Katz argues that the tendency of mainstream neorepublicanism to ground domination in social relatedness and the possibility for choice interference makes it unfit to diagnose the domination of those yet to be born If we want to think of intergenerational injustice as a variety of domination, Katz insists, we must shift to an outcome-based conception that focuses on unjust harm done to future generations, who are unable to resist that harm.

Nothing is less surprising than persistent disagreement in philosophy, but the persistence of disagreement about domination is connected to an interesting question about where the discussion should go from here: What do we want a theory of domination to do? Is our theory of domination supposed to tell us when people are free and when they are not?

Do we want our theory of domination to give us insight into the nature of social injustice? To diagnose political misrule? To motivate a theory of democracy? To describe the underclass in late capitalist societies? To capture the complaint of racial minorities in oppressive racialized hierarchies?

All of the above? All theories of domination are not equally suited to each of these tasks; as a consequence, the appeal of individual theories may differ according to which we find most pressing.

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A related question, at present under-explored in the literature, is how domination does or does not relate to other concepts often used to describe power-related injustices: Young [] distinguishes between domination and oppression, identifying the former with asymmetric power over action and the contexts of action, and the latter with the more diffuse and sometimes unconscious shaping of institutions in ways that deny some social groups the capacity to understand and express themselves except from the perspective of the privileged.

Unfortunately, few have followed her in working out a similar division of labor between these concepts.

For an interesting exceptions, see Bellamy More common is the neorepublican assumption that concern for injustices like oppression can be folded into concern for domination Pettit Just as all theories of domination are not equally suited to every task we might put them to, it may be that attention to domination itself should be supplemented by attention to other varieties of injustice. If nothing else, recent work on domination has dramatically sharpened our understanding of such injustice, even if all its varieties cannot usefully be diagnosed as manifestations of this single ill.

Many thanks to the participants in The Philosophical Underclass. Without your help, it would have been very much more difficult to gather the literature I needed to write this. Domination First published Thu Nov 8, The Basic Idea 2. Who, or What, Can Dominate? Does Domination Require the Exercise of Power? What Kind of Power Is Domination? Domination and Applied Ethics 6.

The Basic Idea There is, of course, considerable disagreement about what domination really is. The basic idea has the following components: Domination is a kind of power, and usually social power—that is, power over other people. Domination involves imbalances or asymmetries in power. The English domination comes from the Latin dominus. A dominus is a master, and mastery represents an extreme of social power. Masters usually have all but complete control over how their slaves will act or over the conditions in which they act.

Domination has many forms. Traditional Roman republicanism recognized a distinction between imperium and dominium —domination by the state contrasted with domination by private parties Pettit ; 31; The power a master has over a slave may be the clearest case of domination, but it is not necessary to have a literal dominus in order to be dominated. For example, tyrants over their subjects and men over women in patriarchal societies are also common examples of domination. Failure to explain why the Paradigms count as domination is sometimes considered reason enough to reject a theory of domination see Lovett , Blunt , and McCammon Other examples may not manifest the extremes of power we see in the Paradigms; but it is generally agreed that domination comes in degrees, and that someone may be dominated even if nobody has total power over them.

Dominating power is in some sense unconstrained. It is up to masters how they will or will not use their power. Such power is often described as arbitrary or discretionary ; or, perhaps, unlimited by the interests of those under its sway; or, perhaps, projects only the vision of the world most favorable to the empowered while preventing the subjugated from seeing themselves or the world on their own terms.

However it is characterized, that claim that domination counts as such because of the absence of some limit recurs in many theories. Domination is an unjust or morally illegitimate form of social power. Whatever domination turns out to be, it is morally serious.

It is a complaint Pettit To be dominated is typically to have cause for indignation and resentment against the dominator or against institutions that dominate or make domination possible.

Domination

An affirmative answer is more often assumed than argued for in the literature, but Frank Lovett tries to motivate it with this example: If A dominates B , A has or exercises sociologically legitimate power over what B is in a position to do. These two motives will be treated in order below: Lovett uses the following case to make his point: Domination and Applied Ethics Because power asymmetries persist in other contexts outside the traditionally political, the idea of domination has been marshaled beyond political philosophy in applied ethics. Conclusion Nothing is less surprising than persistent disagreement in philosophy, but the persistence of disagreement about domination is connected to an interesting question about where the discussion should go from here: Anderson, Elizabeth, , Private Government: Arnold, Samuel and John R.

Bellamy, Richard, , Political Constitutionalism: Price and James Brewer Stewart eds. University of Massachusetts Press. Naissance de la Prison , Paris: Translated as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , Alan Sheridan trans. Havel, Vaclav, , Open Letters: Selected Prose , Paul Wilson ed. Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom , Princeton: Race and Justice in Our Time , Oxford: A Radical View , London: Liberty, Law and Politics , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, doi: Cambridge University Press, 60— A Theory of Freedom and Government , Oxford: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency , Oxford: Williams and Stephen Macedo eds , New York: New York University Press, 87— Richardson, Henry S, , Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy , Oxford: University of Chicago Press.

Essays and Speeches , Marilyn Richardson ed. Skinner, Quentin, , Liberty before Liberalism , Cambridge: Pennsylvania State University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas, , The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation , Philadelphia: Academic Tools How to cite this entry. Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database. Related Entries feminist philosophy, topics: Acknowledgments Many thanks to the participants in The Philosophical Underclass.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see World domination disambiguation. Americanization Global empire , a world power with territory or influence in many places throughout the world. Global governance , the political interaction of transnational actors. Hyperpower , a state that dominates all other states in every sphere of activity, and is traditionally considered to be a step higher than a superpower.

List of largest empires by maximum extent of land area occupied. Mad scientist , a fictional archetype of a scientist, engineer, or professor who is considered "mad" and often depicted as having a desire to "take over the world". Singleton global governance , a hypothetical world order in which there is a single decision-making agency potentially an advanced artificial intelligence at the highest level, capable of exerting effective control over its domain. Superpower , a state with a leading position in the international system and the ability to influence events in its own interest by global projection of power.

Technocracy , a form of organizational structure or system of governance where decision makers are selected on the basis of technological knowledge. Whig history , a school of historiography which claims that the world is moving towards increased liberty and enlightenment. Conspiracy Theories and End-Times Paranoia.

Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press; 1 edition.

Secrecy and Power in American Culture. University of Minnesota Press; 2nd edition. Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age.

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