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The Varying Notions of Authority and Challenging Authority

Decent Essays

Leadership Notions The essays that comprise Traditional Classics on Leadership present varying notions of authority and of challenging authority. This is largely due to the fact that this manuscript is comprised of essays from 31 contributors, ranging from well-known political theorists to some of the more salient voices for individuality that the world has known. Still, there are some points of commonalities in these essays that present a synthesized viewpoint of the concept of challenging authority. First of all, challenging authority is a fairly natural process of life. Authors such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and even Virginia Woolf attest to the fact that human kind is governed by an inherent sense of fierce individuality, which can come into conflict with external factors that are not in accord with it. This point is demonstrated very well in the writings of Hobbes, which were taken from his Leviathan. Hobbes believed that unless there are rules, or social contracts expressly laid out in some form other than just words, it essentially is acceptable for men to pursue whatever wish that they have, whether it conflicts with that of another or not. The author labeled this dearth of a social contract as a state of war in which there essentially is no right or wrong. However, Hobbes believed that the only way such a social contract can be suitably enforced is through the means of force. Such force of course, frequently takes the form of violence or some other

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