PROPERTY AND POWER [POUVOIR]

Property does not seem, at first glance, to figure among the fundamental questions aroused so much by the doctrine of natural right as by Hobbes's theory of politics. We find in it nothing comparable with, for example, the admirable chapter 5, ‘Of Property’, from Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Certain recent studies on the history of natural right and of property in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries give him neither a particular chapter nor even an attentive consideration. This situation is not without some objective foundation: the question of property is entirely subordinated in Hobbes to the political problem. It is in fact the existence of political power [pouvoir] that must take account of the origin, foundation and effectiveness of property. The state does not content itself with giving positive rules to property. It more radically founds the possibility of an appropriation of things:

The same passage in the Latin version of Leviathan states in a more suggestive manner:

If property is implemented, it is not primarily the work of labour upon nature, but the work of the power that founds it through law. More precisely, the first work is conditional on the second: political power [pouvoir] does not give to property its material, but its juridical effectiveness. We could say in this sense that Hobbes operates a political reduction of the problem of property in subordinating the appropriation of goods to the solution of the major political problem of the constitution of a sovereign power [pouvoir].

However, this political reduction of the problem of property risks masking another, perhaps more fundamental, operation, namely, the resurgence of property at the very heart of political theory. Indeed, is not the loss of property's autonomy had at the cost of an underlying reinterpretation of the political in terms of property?