Abstract
Abstract This chapter analyzes Hobbes’s theory of individual human power (potentia), and its transformation across his works. It argues that Hobbes’s early works offer an account of potentia reflecting an intuitive common sense that an individual’s power lies in the faculties or capacities that the individual possesses. It claims that such a conception still bears the marks of scholasticism, and it illustrates this point against a stylized presentation of Aquinas’s conception of potentia. By contrast, the chapter argues that on Hobbes’s later account, individual potentia is irreducibly relational, with the corollary that potentia cannot be identified in abstraction from actual social life. This change belatedly extends the antischolasticism of Hobbes’s natural science into his science of human beings.
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