Motivation and the Will to Power
Ethnopsychology and the Return of Thomas Hobbes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10927589 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C W Nuckolls (0000-0002-0930-0072, Emory University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1995 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 345-359 |
| Publication date | 1995-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy of the Social Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0048-3931 • E-ISSN: 1552-7441 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/004839319502500304 |
| OpenAlex | W1988930224 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 15 |
Like the concept "structure" a generation ago, "power" now figures prominently in the anthropological understanding of human action. This essay attempts to locate the concept of power in the cultural history of Anglo-Saxon political discourse. Discussion focuses on a specific domain of inquiry—"ethnopsychology"— and on one of the texts recognized as exemplary of that domain, Lutz's Unnatural Emotions. In a field largely concerned with matters of cognitive process, of knowledge structures and patterns of inference, the concept of "power" is used to supply motivational force; motivation is the will to power. This is intelligible, however, only against the implicit background of Anglo-Saxon political theory, best represented historically in the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is argued that the circumstances of "post-modernity" make the return of Hobbesianism inevitable and that it is this tradition that ethnopsychology unwittingly reproduces in the quest to understand cognition, emotion, and agency
Action (physics) · Agency (philosophy) · Epistemology · Field (mathematics) · Inference · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
The woman who climbed up the house
A folk model of the mind
Cultural Models in Language and Thought
Human Motives and Cultural Models
Michel Foucault
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
Ghosts
Unnatural Emotions
Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking
The Misplaced Legacy of Gregory Bateson
Pushing Anthropology Past the Posts
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1996 - 2003 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |