This paper examines the foundational question of whether economic or state power is the more essential driver of human society. Beginning with a broad overview of power theories — including condign, compensatory, and conditioned forms — the paper traces the historical evolution of power structures from ancient times through the Industrial Revolution and the Cold War. It then contrasts two dominant frameworks: Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy, which holds that individuals must surrender rights to a sovereign state for civil order, and Karl Marx's historical materialism, which situates economic class struggle as the engine of all social organization. The paper uses these competing frameworks to interrogate how power shifts across historical periods and social arrangements.
The paper demonstrates comparative theoretical framing: it establishes a common analytical lens (types and sources of power) and then applies that lens to two competing intellectual traditions. By positioning Hobbes and Marx as responses to the same underlying problem — how power is held and exercised in society — the paper avoids presenting them as simply contradictory, instead showing how each arises from its historical moment.
The paper opens with a conceptual background section defining power and its forms, then surveys broader theories of power across history. Two dedicated sections follow — one on Hobbes, one on Marx — each grounding the thinker's argument in historical conditions before presenting direct textual evidence. The argument moves chronologically and escalates in specificity, from general definitions to focused philosophical analysis, a structure well-suited to comparative political philosophy essays at the undergraduate level.
The political and sociological aspect of power is the ability of an organization to control its own environment, including the behavior of other entities with which it interacts. Authority is seen as the perception of legitimate power by the social structure of a dominant culture. Power can, of course, be seen as good or evil, but the exercise of power is both endemic and necessary for the modern state as we know it. Certainly within the paradigm of political and economic power there are various permutations surrounding sources of power, the balance of power, and theories of power (Kuusisto).
Balances of power are necessary within any reciprocal arrangement for statecraft to exist: what are the relative strengths, weaknesses, and dimensions of a stable relationship? Given that power is never innate, and one must have some form of power currency to acquire power, power must carry some connotation and degree of unilateralism in order to even be perceived as a tool. This raises the question of the basis for power and how it is held. Power may be held through delegated or forced authority (democratic or autocratic processes), social class or resource currency (material wealth), personal power or charisma (including celebrity and persuasion), moral persuasion (usually the province of religion), or group dynamics (social influences, tradition, or culture) (Nolan).
Some scholarship summarizes the actual types of power as being either condign (based on force), compensatory (based on resources), or conditioned (persuasion); and their actual sources as being personality (individuals), property (material resources), or organizational (the power structure or hierarchical template) (Galbraith).
The deconstruction of power as a political or economic entity has been part of human dialogue since the first cities arose in Mesopotamia. Power structures and struggles were a regular part of the ancient world. Aristotle saw power as a relationship in struggles for intellectual dominance, often grounded in the function of language and culture. Power, then, needs to be understood as a productive mechanism, not simply as a mechanism of socialization and oppression (Haskins). As societies became more industrial and urban, power structures under capitalism grew so complex and endemic that many philosophers argued power was a continual struggle between the domination of other humans and the domination over one's environment.
As society progressed into advanced capitalism and a century of unbridled hostility, the concepts of state and economic power blurred. Power shifts, and continues to shift. Throughout history it moved from one group — society or culture — to another, and the dominant form of power was continually in flux. During the Industrial Revolution, power shifted from nobility (rooted more in feudalism and land economics) to industrialists and financiers who manipulated power based on fiscal gain. Violence became less the dominant form of control, while economic leverage became more common. Certainly after the Cold War, and with the advent of globalism and modern technology, this power paradigm continues to shift — with knowledge becoming the currency of wealth and power structures moving away from the developed nations.
At the basis of most discussions on modern power and statecraft — and the question of which is more foundational to human society, economic or state power — two basic approaches typify the issue. The first, advanced by 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, defined power as man's "present means, to obtain some future apparent good," a political view of statecraft argued even today (Hobbes). Second, reacting to the process of industrialization and rampant capitalism, Karl Marx saw power as primarily arising from ownership and control of property, and therefore economic in both tone and character:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. (Marx)
Thomas Hobbes often described the life of man as "nasty, brutish, and short." He was speaking of the way the majority lived during 16th- and 17th-century Europe, in which for 90% of the population life was a continual struggle. Cities were crowded, noisy, and filthy; night soil was thrown into the streets, horse offal was everywhere, fly-ridden and rotten meat as well as human and animal odor permeated the air. There was no regular medical care; in fact, most people had few teeth left by the age of 30. Pox, disease, and deformity were rampant. Life expectancy was under 40, hygiene was often non-existent, and warfare to support the monarchy and upper fraction of the population was common (Cockayne; Warfare in the 1700s).
Thus, for Hobbes, the view of mankind was not pleasant. The nasty, brutish, and short existence was his characterization of humanity — and one he sought, through metaphysics and philosophy, to find a way for the State to control and help the "unwashed" masses move forward. Humans must escape this brutish state of war and agree to live within a social contract, thereby establishing a just and civil society. For Hobbes, individuals must exist as a larger population beneath authority, and those individuals must, by the very nature of the perpetuation of the species, cede all rights and control to that authority. It is well within the natural rule of law that there might be abuses of authority, and that even though rebellion might be expected, it is up to the individual to maintain that the State is the grand master and the individual but a piece on the chessboard. The State, therefore, must control military, civil, judicial, and even ecclesiastical powers (Martinich).
There were four real types of power for Hobbes: natural power, arriving from God but requiring human control; instrumental power, or the acquisition of more power ("The value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power"); relative power, which exists only in comparison to others; and the balance of ceding power to the state (the Leviathan) as both protection of the self and the use of the state as the predominant force of political power:
[We note] that a man be willing when others are so too, as far forth as for Peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down the right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. (Hobbes)
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. (Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader)
Marx thus saw economics — in the form of the contrast between capitalism and socialism — as the very basis for the structure of the modern state. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned, and development is proportionate to the increasing accumulation and reinvestment of profits. Over time, capitalism progressed through several stages, arriving after the Industrial Revolution at a more mature state of exploitation. However, capitalism tends to incorporate a certain "way of thinking," driven by greed, the search for ever-increasing profits, worldwide expansion, and internal development. Starting from the earliest origins of capitalism, only societies with the capabilities and the appropriate mindset could flourish amid this period of economic, social, and religious dispersion.
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