HOBBES
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"Individualism , as a basic theoretical position, starts at least as far back as Hobbes. Although his conclusion can scarcely be called liberal, his postulates were highly individualistic. Discarding traditional concepts of society, justice, and natural law, he deduced political rights and obligation from the interest and will of dissociated individuals. Individualism of another sort, emphasizing the equal moral worth of every human being, was clearly fundamental in Puritan political thinking. And individualism has a large, if ambiguous, place in Locke's political theory. ALl these theories were closely related to the struggle for a more liberal state. THe Puritan theories and Locke's, between them, provided its main justification. Even the utilitarian doctrine which seemed to supersede them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is at bottom only a restatement of the individualist principles which were worked out in the seventeenth century,: Bentham built on Hobbes. " (C.B.Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford 1962, pp.1-2).
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