Hobbes’s Relational Theory: Beneath Power and Consent
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hobbes is widely regarded as the leading architect of the social contract tradition. The social contract rests on the consent of the contractors, so it is not surprising that Hobbes is viewed as a consent theorist. But at various junctures Hobbes suggests, with the de facto theorists of his day, that effective governmental power is a sufficient basis for public authority and the subject’s duty to obey. I argue that Hobbes was not a de factoist, but neither was he a consent theorist simpliciter. At a more fundamental level he was a relational theorist, where authority and obligation rely on the existence of a morally significant relationship between sovereign and subject. The basic moral relationship that connects sovereign and subject in Hobbes is a trust-like or fiduciary relationship. This relationship explains how the sovereign’s possession of public power can yield authority and obligation independently of consent.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it