Hobbes on Power: Desire, Fear, Security, and Power After Power
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 24, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Thomas Hobbes made one of the most famous claims in the history of thinking about power: human beings display a “perpetual and restless desire of power after power.” Read in isolation, the sentence sounds like a theory of limitless domination. In Hobbes’s own argument, however, power is much broader than domination. It is the present capacity to obtain some future good, and the pressure to acquire more power arises partly because present security cannot be guaranteed by present resources alone. The logic is prospective: human beings desire, anticipate, compare, fear loss, and try to secure the conditions under which future desires can still be pursued.
This is why desire, fear, security, and power belong together in Hobbes. The desire for power is not simply a taste for ruling other people. It includes strength, skill, knowledge, reputation, wealth, friends, alliances, and other means that increase a person’s ability to obtain what they seek. Fear is likewise more than panic. Hobbes often treats it as foresight of future harm: the anticipation that another person’s power may threaten one’s life, liberty, goods, or plans. In conditions where nobody can reliably guarantee protection, even people who would prefer peace can be pushed toward precaution, alliance-building, armament, or preemptive action.
The result is a theory in which insecurity can generate power-seeking without requiring every person to be cruel, vain, or unusually ambitious. Hobbes’s argument is historical philosophy, not a modern psychological law. Contemporary psychology uses narrower constructs—social power, status, dominance, prestige, personal control, authority, and power motivation—and current research warns against treating them as synonyms (Körner, Overbeck, & Schütz, 2025). Hobbes therefore matters to psychology chiefly as a conceptual ancestor and a remarkably systematic analyst of how future-oriented desire, vulnerability, fear, and social interdependence can produce escalating struggles over means.
This article reconstructs Hobbes’s own position from Leviathan and De Cive, then compares it with contemporary psychological concepts without turning a seventeenth-century philosophical theory into empirical evidence. It also separates Hobbes’s concept of power from authority, status, dominance, control, and modern power motivation, preserving the boundaries of the wider Psychology of Power knowledge network.
Hobbes on Power in One Sentence
For Hobbes, power is a person’s present means for obtaining a future apparent good. Because human desire continues through time, because circumstances change, and because other people also possess powers that can obstruct or threaten us, present power is unstable. People therefore seek additional means not only to gain new goods but also to secure the means they already have. “Power after power” names this continuing, future-oriented pressure to preserve and extend one’s effective capacity.
That concise formulation already shows why Hobbes should not be reduced to the slogan that “everyone wants to dominate everyone else.” Domination can be one form of power, but Hobbes’s inventory is much wider. The full text of Leviathan defines natural and instrumental power, describes reputation and friends as powers, treats collective organization as an especially great power, and later explains why the absence of a common power makes mutual insecurity strategically dangerous (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapters X–XIII).
What Does Hobbes Mean by Power?
Power as a present means to a future good
Chapter X of Leviathan gives Hobbes’s basic definition. Power is not first defined as political office, legal authority, prestige, or control over another person. It is a means-to-an-end concept. Something counts as power insofar as it enables an agent to obtain a good that appears desirable in the future. This future orientation is central. Hobbes is interested in what lets a person move from present conditions toward later outcomes.
The word “apparent” also matters. Hobbes does not require the future good to be objectively good or wisely chosen. Human beings act from appetites, aversions, beliefs, expectations, and judgments that can be mistaken. A person can pursue means toward a goal that later proves destructive. Power, in this basic Hobbesian sense, concerns efficacy relative to a desired end; it does not certify the wisdom, morality, or accuracy of the desire.
This makes Hobbes’s concept unusually broad. Physical strength may be power, but so may eloquence, prudence, skill, social connections, wealth, reputation, or favorable circumstances. What unites these heterogeneous things is their instrumental relation to future action. They enlarge the range of outcomes a person can realistically pursue.
Natural power and instrumental power
Hobbes distinguishes what he calls natural or original powers from instrumental powers. Natural powers include eminent capacities of body or mind—strength, practical judgment, arts, eloquence, and other abilities. Instrumental powers are acquired resources that can themselves become means of acquiring still more resources. Hobbes names riches, reputation, and friends among them (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter X).
This distinction introduces a cumulative mechanism. Some powers are productive of further powers. Wealth can purchase protection, education, information, labor, or access. Reputation can attract allies. Friends can become a network of assistance. Skill can produce reputation or resources. Hobbes therefore does not imagine power as a fixed possession. Power can reproduce itself, be converted from one form into another, or disappear when the surrounding social environment changes.
The cumulative feature helps explain the phrase “power after power.” If one resource is also a means to additional resources, power can become path-dependent. Acquiring one advantage changes the probability of acquiring the next. Losing one can threaten several others. Hobbes does not need a separate instinct for accumulation to explain every case; the structure of means and future dependence already creates pressure to secure a continuing chain of capabilities.
Collective power: why association matters
Hobbes also says that the greatest human power is power compounded from the powers of many people united by consent. That claim is crucial for his political theory. A lone individual may possess strength or skill, but organized cooperation can combine resources, coordinate action, and produce capacities no isolated person has. A faction, alliance, army, corporation-like association, or commonwealth can therefore possess power through composition.
This is one bridge between Hobbes’s psychology of individuals and his theory of political order. The same human beings whose dispersed powers create mutual danger can, under a common structure, combine those powers. The problem is not simply that people possess power. The problem is how powers are related, coordinated, constrained, and made predictable. Hobbes’s answer is institutional: transform a field of uncertain private powers into a common power capable of setting and enforcing rules.
Power is not the same as worth, dignity, or honor
Hobbes’s Chapter X is titled “Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthiness” because he distinguishes concepts that ordinary language often blurs. A person’s “worth” is connected to the price others would give for the use of that person’s power. “Dignity” is public worth conferred by the commonwealth through offices, titles, or public employment. Honor concerns signs that one person recognizes another’s power or value. These are related to power, yet they are not identical to it.
The distinction is surprisingly modern in spirit. Contemporary psychology likewise treats power, status, dominance, and prestige as separable hierarchy constructs rather than interchangeable labels. A 2025 systematic review found persistent jingle-jangle problems in the literature—different constructs measured with similar scales and similar constructs measured under different names—and proposed an integrative framework to distinguish them (Körner et al., 2025). Hobbes’s categories are historically different, but his insistence on conceptual separation is still useful.
What Does “Power After Power” Mean?
The famous phrase appears in Chapter XI of Leviathan. Hobbes calls the continuing desire for power a general inclination of humankind, yet he immediately explains that its cause is not always dissatisfaction with moderate power or a wish for ever more intense pleasure. A person may seek more power because the means they presently possess cannot be assured without acquiring additional means (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XI).
That qualification changes the meaning of the passage. Power-seeking can be defensive. A household may accumulate savings because future illness is uncertain. A ruler may strengthen institutions because existing authority is vulnerable. A group may seek allies because another group is growing stronger. Hobbes’s seventeenth-century examples differ from modern life, but the structural point is clear: maintaining a position can require new resources when the environment is dynamic.
The phrase “power after power” therefore describes more than greed. It captures a temporal problem. A present capacity is only temporarily sufficient. New desires arise, old resources depreciate, rivals change, alliances shift, information is imperfect, and threats cannot always be predicted. The desire for continued efficacy can become a desire for additional power because future security is never contained entirely in the present.
This is also why Hobbes’s account belongs beside, rather than inside, the modern psychological question Why Do People Want Power?. The modern question asks about multiple motives for seeking social power—impact, autonomy, status, security, leadership, instrumental goals, and more. Hobbes offers one historically important philosophical mechanism: means are desired because they make future goods attainable and because present means may require reinforcement to remain secure.
Felicity is movement, not a final resting point
Hobbes’s concept of felicity supplies the deeper background. He rejects the idea that human happiness consists in reaching a final condition where desire permanently stops. In Leviathan, felicity is continuing success in moving from one desired object to another. A living person continues to sense, imagine, want, avoid, plan, and act; the end of all desire would be the end of life itself.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Hobbes on the emotions emphasizes this future-directed architecture: felicity is continual success in satisfying desires, and Hobbes’s passions repeatedly orient action toward objects not yet attained (Hobbes on the Emotions, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Power is valuable because it supplies the means for that ongoing sequence.
Power after power is thus connected to an open-ended life process. A means that secures one goal becomes part of the route to another. Even when a person is content with current pleasures, the future remains. Food must be obtained again. Safety must persist. Relationships require maintenance. Possessions must be protected. Plans generate new dependencies. Hobbes’s account is not a theory of one terminal desire for power; it is a theory of how continuing desire makes means continually relevant.
Security, not endless pleasure, is the pivotal explanation
Hobbes explicitly says that the restless acquisition of power does not always arise because a person wants more intense delight. The central issue is assurance. To live well tomorrow, one must retain or acquire the means that will still work tomorrow. Security therefore becomes a bridge between desire and accumulation.
This is one of the strongest reasons to resist a caricature of Hobbes as saying that human beings are naturally addicted to domination. A person can prefer peace and still seek more power if peace appears fragile. A person can prefer modest goals and still accumulate resources if those goals depend on conditions controlled by others. Hobbes’s mechanism is relational and anticipatory: what counts as enough depends partly on what other agents can do.
The modern concept of personal control helps clarify the difference. Feeling able to regulate one’s own life is not the same construct as having power over other people. Hobbes did not make the contemporary psychometric distinction, but many of his examples show why a desire for secure agency can become entangled with control of resources, alliances, and other people’s behavior.
Desire, Fear, and Security in Hobbes’s Psychology
Hobbes’s account of power works inside a broader psychology of appetite and aversion. Human beings are moved toward what appears good and away from what appears harmful. Deliberation involves shifting appetites and aversions concerning future action. Fear is one of these future-facing passions, and it becomes politically decisive because human beings can imagine harms before they occur.
The modern temptation is to translate Hobbes immediately into contemporary terms such as anxiety, threat sensitivity, loss aversion, or approach–avoidance motivation. That translation should be resisted. Hobbes’s psychology belongs to a seventeenth-century materialist and philosophical system. Modern constructs have their own definitions and evidence. The useful comparison is structural: Hobbes treats action as future-oriented, shaped by attraction and aversion, and sensitive to anticipated consequences.
Recent scholarship continues to emphasize how central passions and practical reasoning are to Hobbes. Amy Schmitter argues that Hobbes’s sovereign functions not merely as political authority but also as a “common measure” that stabilizes public practical reasoning and coordinates otherwise conflicting private judgments (Schmitter, 2025). This interpretation highlights how Hobbes links psychological coordination to political order rather than treating sovereignty as brute force alone.
Fear is foresight, not merely panic
In De Cive, Hobbes explains that fear includes foresight of future evil. It can produce distrust, caution, preparation, alliance-seeking, defensive measures, or flight. A person who locks a door, carries protection, or fortifies a border may be acting from fear in this extended sense without experiencing panic (Hobbes, De Cive, Chapter I).
That broad definition makes fear cognitively significant. Fear contains an expectation about what another person or event might do. It is therefore inseparable from uncertainty, beliefs about other agents, and judgments about vulnerability. In Hobbes’s model, two people can each prefer peace and still fear that the other may attack first. Their behavior can then become mutually escalating even when neither began with an independent desire for conquest.
This also explains why Hobbes can say that fear disposes people both to anticipate attack and to seek aid through society. Fear has more than one behavioral direction. If defense alone looks sufficient, it may support caution. If isolation looks dangerous, it may support alliance. If waiting looks fatal, it may support preemption. The passion does not dictate a single action; it alters the perceived urgency and structure of choice.
Diffidence: insecurity between roughly equal agents
The word “diffidence” in Hobbes is often misunderstood as low self-confidence. In the crucial passages it means distrust or lack of assurance. Hobbes begins from a rough natural equality: even a stronger person can be killed by a weaker one through alliance, surprise, or strategy. Because nobody is invulnerable, superiority cannot guarantee safety.
Equality therefore produces a paradox. Equal vulnerability can be morally attractive to modern readers, but in Hobbes’s state of nature it also means that no one can permanently eliminate the possibility of being harmed. If two people desire the same scarce object, each may reasonably view the other as a potential obstacle. If they cannot appeal to a common authority, private judgment remains the final court.
Hobbes’s point is not that every encounter becomes violent. It is that the possibility of violence changes the strategic meaning of uncertainty. Where there is no dependable common power, another person’s capacity can become a reason for precaution. The condition is unstable because power is relative to future threats as well as future goods.
Competition, Diffidence, and Glory: Hobbes’s Three Causes of Conflict
Chapter XIII of Leviathan famously names three principal causes of quarrel: competition, diffidence, and glory. These terms describe different pathways into conflict, and collapsing them into one aggressive instinct destroys much of Hobbes’s analysis. Competition concerns gain, diffidence concerns safety, and glory concerns reputation or recognition.
Competition: conflict over gain
Competition arises when different agents want goods that cannot simultaneously be possessed or used in the same way. Scarcity need not mean absolute material scarcity; a position, office, alliance, territory, reputation, or exclusive advantage can also be rivalrous. In such conditions, another person may become an obstacle because their success reduces one’s own options.
This pathway resembles an instrumental contest. The object of conflict lies outside the conflict itself. People fight because they want something, not necessarily because they enjoy fighting. Hobbes’s analysis therefore distinguishes competition from glory, where the social meaning of superiority and recognition becomes more direct.
Diffidence: conflict for safety
Diffidence is the security pathway. If another person may attack, waiting can be dangerous. Hobbes says that from distrust there can appear to be no reasonable way to secure oneself except anticipation—using force or stratagem before a threatening rival becomes able to do the same (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XIII).
This is one of Hobbes’s deepest ideas because it shows how conflict can arise without malignant motives. A person who would prefer to remain within “modest bounds” may still increase power when others cannot be trusted to do likewise. Defensive accumulation by one party can look offensive to another, which makes further defensive accumulation appear necessary. The process can become self-reinforcing.
Glory: conflict over valuation and recognition
Glory introduces a more explicitly social motive. Hobbes pays close attention to reputation, honor, contempt, and the value people expect others to place on them. Insults or signs of undervaluation can provoke retaliation because people seek recognition of the worth they assign themselves.
This dimension prevents Hobbes from being reduced to a theory of material self-preservation. People care about how they are regarded. They can sacrifice safety for reputation, religion, honor, vengeance, or collective identification. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy therefore cautions against reading Hobbes as if he assumed that people are always reliably selfish or rational calculators of narrow self-interest.
The State of Nature: A Condition of Insecurity, Not Continuous Fighting
Hobbes’s “state of nature” is an analytic construction used to show what follows when there is no common power capable of reliably enforcing rules among roughly equal and vulnerable agents. He calls this a condition of war, but war does not require uninterrupted physical combat. A standing disposition toward conflict—where people cannot rely on stable security—is enough to transform ordinary life.
This distinction matters psychologically. Chronic insecurity changes what counts as rational preparation. Time and labor that could be used for production, learning, travel, cooperation, or long-term projects must instead be diverted toward protection. Trust becomes costly because betrayal is difficult to punish. Promises become fragile because there is no dependable third party to enforce them.
Hobbes’s bleak inventory of life without secure order is therefore not just a claim about violence. It is a claim about the opportunity costs of insecurity. Fear shortens planning horizons. Uncertainty weakens cooperation. Private power must be held in reserve for defense. The absence of predictable institutions changes the ecology of choice.
This is also why the historical state of nature should not be treated as a laboratory result about human beings. Hobbes was constructing a philosophical explanation of political order during an era marked by civil conflict. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Hobbes systematically moves from accounts of mind, language, reason, knowledge, and passions toward questions of collective life. His political model is embedded in that larger philosophical architecture.
Did Hobbes Think Human Beings Are Naturally Selfish or Evil?
The simple answer is that “Hobbes thought everyone is selfish and evil” is a poor summary. Hobbes certainly gives self-preservation and self-concern central roles, and he frequently describes ambition, competition, vanity, and conflict. Yet his theory also includes sociability, affection, fear, hope, curiosity, generosity, concern for reputation, religious passions, and the capacity to follow rules of peace.
A person can behave destructively in Hobbes without maximizing personal advantage. Glory can override safety. Anger can override calculation. Belief can motivate sacrifice. Group loyalty can expose a person to danger. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasizes that Hobbes’s agents are not consistently rational egoists; many of the problems he analyzes arise precisely because people are carried by passions, doctrines, and concern with others’ opinions (IEP: Hobbes, Moral and Political Philosophy).
Nor does Hobbes need to assert that people are morally evil by nature to generate the state-of-nature problem. Rough equality, uncertain intentions, competing desires, and lack of common enforcement are enough to make distrust consequential. A benign person cannot guarantee that others know they are benign. Even accurate knowledge of one neighbor says little about unknown strangers or future changes.
The stronger reading is institutional rather than moralistic: order cannot depend on everyone remaining benevolent, farsighted, and trustworthy under conditions where defection may pay and private enforcement is unreliable. Hobbes’s political problem is how to make cooperation robust to imperfect motives and imperfect knowledge.
Why Insecurity Can Produce More Power-Seeking
Hobbes’s most psychologically interesting mechanism is recursive. If power is a means to future goods, then security of power becomes itself a condition for future goods. If that security depends on additional resources, people seek more power to protect existing power. But other people observe the increase and may respond by increasing their own power.
The process can be represented as a simple sequence: vulnerability creates uncertainty; uncertainty creates fear; fear increases the value of precaution; precaution increases power; visible increases in power alter other people’s threat assessments; altered threat assessments stimulate further precaution. Nothing in this sequence requires an original love of domination.
Modern social science sometimes analyzes similar feedback loops under concepts such as security dilemmas, strategic uncertainty, arms races, or competitive escalation. Those frameworks should not be projected backward and attributed to Hobbes as if he used their modern terminology. The resemblance is structural: one agent’s attempt to become safer can change another agent’s environment in a way that makes the second feel less safe.
A recent chapter by S. A. Lloyd develops a related problem inside social-contract theory: Hobbes’s own account of changing power relations and alliance formation can destabilize the settlement that is supposed to secure order (Lloyd, 2024). This is a contemporary scholarly interpretation, not Hobbes’s explicit conclusion, and it illustrates why the dynamics of power remain a live problem in Hobbes scholarship.
From Private Power to a Common Power
Hobbes’s solution is not the abolition of power. It is the construction of a power capable of making rules effective. Individuals covenant with one another to authorize a person or assembly to act in their name, creating what Hobbes calls the commonwealth. The multitude becomes politically one through representation.
This is a transformation in the structure of power. Before the commonwealth, individuals rely heavily on their own capacities, families, factions, alliances, and anticipatory strategies. After institution, a common authority can define rules, settle disputes, punish violations, and coordinate defense. The individual no longer needs to treat every disagreement as a potentially private contest of force.
Hobbes famously describes the sovereign as bearing the combined strength of the multitude. The commonwealth is powerful precisely because dispersed powers are united. In this sense, political order is not power’s opposite. It is power reorganized into a public form intended to produce peace and common defense (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XVII).
This point connects naturally to the distinction between social power and authority. Modern social psychology often defines power through asymmetric control over valued outcomes or resources. Authority adds legitimacy, recognized role, or accepted right to direct. Hobbes’s sovereign combines overwhelming practical power with authorization, but the conceptual route by which Hobbes gets there is distinct from modern psychological definitions.
Why Covenants Need Enforcement
For Hobbes, agreement by itself cannot solve the problem of insecurity. A promise may express intention, yet a rational party can hesitate to perform first when there is no assurance that the other side will perform afterward. Words need an enforcement environment in which breaking a covenant has predictable consequences.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on coercion highlights this Hobbesian argument: coercive power supplies assurance that makes reciprocal performance rational in civil society (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Coercion). Fear does not disappear; its object and function change. Instead of fearing unpredictable private retaliation from everyone, subjects can anticipate a public sanction attached to known rules.
The psychological importance lies in expectations. Cooperation becomes easier when people can form stable beliefs about what happens after compliance and after violation. Hobbes’s common power changes the payoff structure of interaction, but it also changes the informational environment. Rules become public reference points; enforcement makes those reference points credible.
Fear Before and After the Commonwealth
Fear performs two different roles in Hobbes. In the natural condition, mutual fear is decentralized and destabilizing: each person fears the uncertain power and intentions of others. In civil society, fear of public punishment can be centralized and stabilizing: it discourages breaches of covenant and makes peaceful cooperation more predictable.
This does not mean Hobbes thinks terror is the only cement of society. Passions that incline people toward peace include fear of death, desire for things necessary to comfortable living, and hope that industry can obtain them. Reason identifies rules conducive to peace. Public order works by aligning these motives with enforceable institutions rather than relying on one emotion alone.
Recent scholarship gives this coordination an epistemic dimension. Schmitter argues that the sovereign’s public standards can function as a “common measure” for practical judgment, reducing disputes that private reason alone cannot settle (Schmitter, 2025). On this reading, Hobbesian sovereignty coordinates judgments as well as behavior.
Power, Authority, and Authorization in Hobbes
Hobbes’s vocabulary makes it tempting to treat sovereign power and authority as the same thing, but analytically they can be separated. Power concerns effective means. Authority concerns the right to act in another’s name or the recognized standing to command. The commonwealth joins them through authorization: subjects become authors of the sovereign’s public acts in Hobbes’s formal construction.
For readers approaching the topic through psychology, this distinction matters because having the capacity to force compliance is different from being recognized as entitled to issue a command. The dedicated comparison Power vs Authority examines that distinction across Hobbes, Weber, and modern psychology; it should not be collapsed into Hobbes’s own theory.
Likewise, Authority in Psychology is a broader contemporary construct involving perceived legitimacy, expertise, trust, role recognition, and social influence. Hobbes contributes historically to thinking about why an authorized common power can end private judgment as the final arbiter, but he does not provide a contemporary empirical psychology of authority.
The live article Legitimacy and Authority develops the modern question of why people accept rules and institutions. Hobbes’s own answer is normatively and historically specific: covenant, authorization, peace, protection, and the logic of escaping insecure private power.
Does Hobbesian Obedience Have Limits?
Hobbes is famous for defending extensive sovereign authority, yet self-preservation remains a structural limit in his account of obligation. In Chapter XIV of Leviathan he says a person cannot be understood to have laid down the right to resist those who assault them by force to take their life. He later states even more directly that a covenant not to defend oneself from force is void (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XIV).
This is not a modern rights theory and should not be rewritten as one. Hobbes’s point follows from the logic of voluntary transfer: giving up the right of self-defense against immediate lethal force cannot plausibly be understood as a means to one’s own preservation, which is the end for which rights are relinquished in the first place.
The same structure explains why protection is so central. Political obligation is tied to the purpose for which the commonwealth is instituted—peace and defense. Hobbes’s sovereign is extraordinarily powerful, but the architecture of the theory keeps returning to the problem that made sovereignty necessary: vulnerable beings seek conditions under which they can continue to live and pursue future goods.
Hobbesian Power Is Not the Same as Dominance
Dominance is one route by which a person can impose costs, threats, intimidation, or coercive pressure on others. Hobbes certainly discusses conquest and the ability to hurt, but his general definition of power includes many capacities that are neither dominance nor interpersonal control. Skill, reputation, wealth, friendship, and collective organization can all count as power.
Modern psychology now treats dominance and prestige as distinct status strategies, and it also distinguishes both from power and status themselves. The 2025 hierarchy review by Körner and colleagues makes this separation explicit (Körner et al., 2025). A 2026 theory by Hays, Lee, Blader, and Galinsky likewise argues that power and status arise from different forms of interdependence and produce distinct psychological experiences (Hays et al., 2026).
These contemporary models do not verify Hobbes. They provide a vocabulary for seeing how broad his category is. If readers equate “power after power” with “dominance after dominance,” they silently substitute a narrower modern construct for Hobbes’s own definition.
Hobbesian Power Is Not the Same as Status or Prestige
Status concerns social rank, esteem, respect, or deference. Prestige concerns influence granted because others value a person’s expertise, success, or qualities. Hobbes analyzes reputation, honor, titles, and public dignity, so status-like phenomena are clearly present in his system. Yet they remain related forms or signs of power rather than the full meaning of power itself.
The distinction is essential because reputation can become instrumental power. If others believe a person is capable, dangerous, wealthy, honorable, or well connected, that belief can change their willingness to cooperate, defer, attack, or ally. Social evaluation therefore enters Hobbes’s power system as a causal resource.
In modern research, however, status is not simply a subset of power. The current evidence base increasingly treats power and status as conceptually distinct dimensions of hierarchy, with different relational foundations and psychological consequences (Hays et al., 2026). Historical interpretation and modern construct validity should therefore remain separate.
Hobbesian Power Is Not the Same as Personal Control
Personal control is the perceived or actual ability to regulate one’s own circumstances and choices. Power over others concerns asymmetry in the capacity to affect other people’s outcomes. These can overlap, but they can also diverge. A person may have high autonomy with little control over others, or strong formal authority while being constrained by institutions and dependence.
Hobbes does not formulate that modern distinction, yet his security argument often concerns the ability to preserve one’s own future agency. Someone seeks resources because being dependent on another person’s uncertain will is dangerous. The conceptual bridge to autonomy is therefore plausible, while any claim that Hobbes “discovered” a modern psychological construct would be historically inaccurate.
For the contemporary distinction, see Power and Control: Why Power Over Others Differs From Personal Control. That article owns the modern comparison; the present article uses it only to keep Hobbes’s historical vocabulary from swallowing a neighboring psychological intent.
Hobbes and Modern Psychology of Power: What Can Be Compared?
Modern psychological research on social power asks how asymmetrical control of resources or outcomes changes attention, cognition, affect, goal pursuit, and behavior. A foundational formulation is the approach–inhibition theory of power, which proposed that higher power activates approach-related processes while lower power increases inhibition and sensitivity to threat (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003).
A large 2025 meta-analysis tested that framework across 1,712 effect sizes from 813 independent samples and 269,534 participants. It found overall support for approach associations of power, with approach effects generally stronger than inhibition effects, while also refining the mechanisms through which power relates to attention, cognition, affect, and behavior (Sabey, Shanklin, Colquitt, & Baer, 2025).
This evidence concerns modern operationalizations of power. It does not demonstrate Hobbes’s universal claim about “power after power,” nor does it establish his state-of-nature model. The legitimate comparison is narrower. Hobbes and contemporary psychology both treat power as consequential for future action, and both recognize that threat, constraint, resources, and social relations matter. They reach those ideas through different methods and with different levels of empirical support.
Modern evidence also reinforces the need for conceptual precision. Power, status, dominance, prestige, and motives concerning these hierarchy positions are distinguishable constructs, even though the literature has often mixed them (Körner et al., 2025). Hobbes’s broad “present means” category therefore cannot simply be inserted into a twenty-first-century questionnaire and treated as the same variable.
Is “Power After Power” a Theory of Power Motivation?
No. McClelland’s need for power, often abbreviated nPower, is a twentieth-century psychological motive construct with specific measurement traditions and empirical hypotheses. Hobbes’s “power after power” is a philosophical claim about the continuing need for means under conditions of ongoing desire and insecurity.
There is an obvious family resemblance: both concern recurrent orientation toward impact or capability. Yet the resemblance is not identity. A person could score high on a modern power-motive measure for reasons involving influence, leadership, reputation, or dominance; Hobbes’s logic would also predict some continued acquisition of means among people who are not unusually high in a trait-like power motive.
The broad motivational question belongs to Why Do People Want Power?, while the exact McClelland construct belongs to the dedicated nPower article. Hobbes’s contribution here is the security-of-means mechanism, not a historical prototype of a modern psychometric scale.
Hobbes and Nietzsche: “Power After Power” Is Not the Will to Power
Hobbes’s phrase is sometimes placed beside Nietzsche’s will to power because both philosophers make power central to human striving. The similarity can be illuminating only if the differences remain explicit. Hobbes defines power instrumentally as present means to future apparent goods and connects accumulation to continuing desire and security. Nietzsche’s will to power belongs to a different philosophical project, vocabulary, chronology, and interpretive controversy.
The dedicated article Will to Power: Nietzsche, Psychology, Ressentiment, and Self-Overcoming owns Nietzsche’s canonical intent. Reading Hobbes through Nietzsche can produce provocative philosophy, but it should not be presented as Hobbes’s own theory.
Is Hobbes’s Theory a Security Dilemma?
Calling Hobbes’s account a “security dilemma” can be useful as a modern analogy: defensive measures by one agent may appear threatening to another, producing mutual escalation. But the term belongs to later political and strategic theory. Hobbes himself speaks of diffidence, anticipation, mutual fear, and the need to increase power when standing only on defense would leave one vulnerable.
The safest formulation is therefore historical: Hobbes describes a mechanism that resembles what later theorists would call a security dilemma. The resemblance helps modern readers see why individually defensive behavior can produce collectively dangerous outcomes. It does not make Hobbes the author of every later theory built around that pattern.
This distinction also prevents a conceptual mistake common in popular summaries: treating Hobbes as if he said aggression comes first and fear follows. In the diffidence pathway, fear can come first. Anticipatory power-seeking may be a response to uncertainty about others’ intentions.
Why a Common Power Changes the Psychology of Interaction
A common power changes more than the probability of punishment. It changes what people can expect from one another. If rules are public and sanctions credible, cooperation no longer depends entirely on personal trust. People can enter exchanges with greater assurance that promises, property claims, and procedures have enforceable meaning.
This expectation effect is psychologically important even if one rejects Hobbes’s case for undivided sovereignty. Stable institutions can lengthen time horizons, make investment in future projects more rational, and reduce the need to maintain private readiness for conflict. Hobbes dramatizes this contrast through the opposition between insecure natural liberty and civil order.
Schmitter’s 2025 interpretation extends the point: public power supplies a common standard that can stabilize practical reasoning, not only behavior (Schmitter, 2025). Edmundson’s 2025 treatment likewise presents Hobbes as moving from equality and insecurity toward the need for an arbiter or “Common Power” capable of resolving disputes that otherwise remain dangerously open (Edmundson, 2025).
Where Hobbes’s Argument Is Strongest
Hobbes is strongest as an analyst of interaction under uncertainty. He notices that people do not choose in a social vacuum. What I do depends partly on what I believe you can do, what I think you believe I can do, and what each of us expects from third parties. Power is therefore relational even when it is possessed as an individual resource.
He is also strong on temporality. Security is not a one-time achievement. A person who can obtain a good today still needs means tomorrow. A stable life requires not merely possession but continued capacity. That insight explains why a desire for security can generate accumulation without assuming insatiable appetite for pleasure.
Finally, Hobbes is strong on the institutional transformation of expectations. A rule that nobody can enforce is psychologically and strategically different from a rule backed by a credible common authority. Covenants, sanctions, and public standards change what agents can reasonably expect from one another.
Where Hobbes’s Argument Remains Contested
Hobbes’s generalizations about humankind are philosophical propositions, not conclusions from representative experiments or longitudinal studies. Contemporary readers should therefore resist treating the state of nature as an empirically verified baseline of human behavior. Humans cooperate under many conditions without Hobbesian sovereign structures, and modern behavioral science documents substantial variation across individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures.
Interpretation is also contested inside Hobbes scholarship. The role of egoism, the strength of the desire for power, the exact relation between fear and reason, and the stability of absolute sovereignty have all generated competing readings. Lloyd’s 2024 analysis argues that Hobbes’s own dynamics of power and alliances complicate the stability of his social-contract solution (Lloyd, 2024).
The psychological language itself has historical limits. “Fear,” “passion,” “reason,” “power,” and “felicity” do not map one-to-one onto current constructs. Hobbes’s materialist psychology treats passions as motions and deliberation as a sequence of appetites and aversions. That framework helped organize his philosophy, but it is not a contemporary cognitive or affective model.
The best use of Hobbes in psychology is therefore conceptual and historical. He provides a disciplined set of questions: What counts as a means? Why does security require future capacity? How does mutual vulnerability change behavior? When can defensive action become mutually escalating? What does institutional enforcement do to expectations? Modern evidence can investigate analogous mechanisms without treating Hobbes’s answers as settled science.
A Psychological Reading of “Power After Power”
A psychologically careful reading can summarize Hobbes’s mechanism in six steps. First, living agents continue to desire and avoid. Second, future goods require means. Third, those means can be threatened by changing circumstances and other people. Fourth, people are vulnerable enough that no private stock of power guarantees permanent safety. Fifth, additional power can therefore serve both acquisition and assurance. Sixth, when everyone reasons under similar uncertainty, attempts at security can feed reciprocal power accumulation.
The important variable is not simply “how much a person likes power.” It is the relationship among desire, vulnerability, expectations, resources, and other agents. A person with modest desires may still seek extensive means if their environment is unstable. Conversely, a person in a trusted and well-governed environment may need less private power to enjoy greater practical security.
This is the enduring conceptual force of Hobbes’s theory. Power is embedded in a system of dependence. One person’s means alter another person’s options; one person’s fear changes another person’s expectations; institutions rearrange the field in which both choose. Hobbes’s psychology of power is therefore less a portrait of a uniquely power-hungry individual than a theory of how finite, future-oriented, vulnerable agents can become trapped in escalating relations of power.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Hobbes’s definition of power?
In Leviathan, Hobbes defines a person’s power broadly as present means for obtaining a future apparent good. The category includes capacities of body and mind as well as acquired resources such as wealth, reputation, friends, and other instruments that can help secure later goals (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter X).
What does Hobbes mean by “power after power”?
He means that human beings continually require means for future desires and for securing the means they already possess. Hobbes explicitly says the desire for more power does not always arise from wanting greater pleasure; it can arise because present power cannot be assured without further acquisition.
Did Hobbes think everyone wants to dominate other people?
No. Domination is only one possible form of power. Hobbes’s category includes strength, skill, resources, reputation, alliances, and collective organization. His security argument also explains why people who would prefer peace may still seek additional power.
Why is fear so important for Hobbes?
Fear is future-oriented. In De Cive, Hobbes describes it as foresight of future evil, which can produce caution, preparation, alliance, flight, or defensive force. Mutual fear becomes politically important because roughly equal and vulnerable people cannot reliably know that others will remain harmless.
What is diffidence in Hobbes?
Diffidence means distrust or lack of assurance, not simply shyness or low self-esteem. It is the insecurity created when people cannot confidently rely on others’ intentions or on a common authority to protect them.
What are competition, diffidence, and glory?
They are Hobbes’s three principal causes of quarrel in the state of nature. Competition is conflict for gain, diffidence is conflict for safety, and glory is conflict over reputation, valuation, or recognition. They represent different pathways into confrontation.
Why does Hobbes think a sovereign is necessary?
Because promises and private judgment are insufficient to secure peace when no common authority can enforce covenants and settle disputes. A sovereign concentrates the powers of many into a common power capable of making rules credible and coordinating expectations.
Is Hobbes’s “power after power” the same as McClelland’s need for power?
No. McClelland’s nPower is a modern psychological motive construct. Hobbes’s phrase belongs to a seventeenth-century philosophical theory of continuing desire, future means, insecurity, and political order.
Is Hobbes’s power the same as modern social power?
No. Modern social psychology usually uses narrower operational definitions, often centered on asymmetric control over valued resources or outcomes. Hobbes’s category is broader and historically specific. Contemporary research also distinguishes power from status, dominance, prestige, authority, and personal control.
Does modern psychology prove Hobbes was right?
No. Modern evidence can test contemporary hypotheses about power, threat, approach, inhibition, hierarchy, and social influence, but it does not empirically validate Hobbes’s state of nature or his universal philosophical claims. The strongest use of the comparison is conceptual: Hobbes identified mechanisms involving future goals, vulnerability, uncertainty, and reciprocal dependence that remain psychologically interesting.
Related Articles
References
Edmundson, W. A. (2025). Thomas Hobbes, born with fear. In The Social Contract: Political Equality from Putney to Rawls. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009395274.003
Hays, N. A., Lee, A. J., Blader, S. L., & Galinsky, A. D. (2026). The social relations-approach theory of social hierarchy: Understanding the distinct psychological experiences of status and power. Psychological Review, 133(4), 957–993. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000618
Hobbes, T. (1642/1651). Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (De Cive). In The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. II. Project Gutenberg
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. In The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. III. Project Gutenberg
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Thomas Hobbes: Moral and political philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.2.265
Körner, R., Overbeck, J. R., & Schütz, A. (2025). Structuring hierarchy concepts: Evaluating measures of power, status, dominance, and prestige on the basis of an integrative model and systematic literature review. Psychological Bulletin, 151(3), 322–364. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000470
Lloyd, S. A. (2024). Introducing realistic power relations into the new social contract: A Hobbesian example. In M. Moehler & J. Thrasher (Eds.), New Approaches to Social Contract Theory: Liberty, Equality, Diversity, and the Open Society (pp. 17–36). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198878650.003.0002
Sabey, T. B., Shanklin, B. C., Colquitt, J. A., & Baer, M. D. (2025). The approach-inhibition theory of power: A meta-analytic test and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 151(10), 1245–1279. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000500
Schmitter, A. M. (2025). A common measure: Hobbes on the epistemic functions of public reason. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 63(2), 275–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12612
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2020). Hobbes on the emotions. In 17th and 18th Century Theories of Emotions. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotions-17th18th/LD3Hobbes.html
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2022). Coercion. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/coercion/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2025). Thomas Hobbes. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes/