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This chapter will consider alternative foundations for the modern analysis of power: the contributions of the seventeenth-century English political theorist, Thomas Hobbes, and the writings of the sixteenth century Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli. These two were the most famous of early modern writers on power. They took an analytical and empirically oriented stance towards power, rather than the primarily religious or ethical stance adopted by their forebears. Although it may be argued that these authors provide two distinct, traditional roots for modern concerns with power, one has been far more fertile for modern developments than the other. Modern problems of power derive their conceptualization primarily from the discursive premises which Hobbes first outlined in detail. Machiavelli has been far less evident as a precursor, although his strategic conception of power, which was played out in the micro-politics of …