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bellum omnium contra omnes
Latin: the war of all against all, a phrase especially associated with Thomas Hobbes's description of the state of nature.

consent
A central concern of liberal political theory is to determine the place of consent in the legitimation of social and political practices. Coercion, exploitation, fraud, deception, and perhaps more ...

contract, social
The imaginary device through which equally imaginary individuals, living in solitude (or, perhaps, in nuclear families), without government, without a stable division of labour or dependable exchange ...

freedom, political
The problem of political freedom can be seen as that of reconciling the value of freedom with the restrictions which seem to be a necessary feature of life in a ...

international Relations
The discipline that studies interactions between and among states, and more broadly, the workings of the international system as a whole. It can be conceived of either as a multidisciplinary field, ...

John Locke
(1632–1704)English philosopher. Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset and educated at Oxford, where he seemed destined for a career in medicine. In 1666 he met Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later the 1st ...

master/slave morality
A stage in the evolution of moral and political consciousness, described in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) of Hegel, and subsequently influential on many theories of freedom and history. On ...

nasty, brutish, and short
‘… and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, i. xiii. 9). This ...

political Philosophy
Reflection on the nature of human community and government, and relations between the collective and the individual. Topics include the legitimacy of government in its different forms, the ...

social contract
A term dating to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and made explicit by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) that describes the desirable and usually mutually accepted forms of ...

Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679)English philosopher. There were two key components in Hobbes's conception of humankind: he was a materialist, claiming that there was no more to the mind than the physical motions ...
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