There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in (...) modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it. (shrink)

There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in (...) modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legitimacy over justice, the relation between ethics and politics, and the place of imagination in politics. The thread uniting these themes is the importance Hobbes placed on achieving a moral consensus around peaceful coexistence, a point which distances him from realists who view the two as competing goals of (...) politics. The article maintains that only a qualified version of the autonomy of the political position can be attributed to Hobbes, while arguing more generally that attending to the relation between ethics and politics is central to assessing his liberal credentials from a realist perspective. Against the prevalent reading of Hobbes as a hypothetical contract theorist, the article proceeds to show that the place of consent in his theory is better understood as part of his wider goal of transforming the imagination of his audience: a goal which is animated by concerns that realists share. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legit...

This paper investigates the development of Hobbes’s theory of imagination and its unique intervention in the scientific debates of the seventeenth century. I argue that this intervention is designed to solve a tension between Hobbes’s scientific and political commitments. His scientific commitments led him to take the imagination seriously. While unorthodox in many ways, Hobbes was working within the predominant scientific framework of his time, which can be traced back to Aristotle and Galen. The same framework, however, was used for (...) naturalistic explanations for prophecy. This posed a problem for Hobbes, who was equally committed to the advances of science and to guarding against the political threat posed by prophets. I argue that Hobbes’s theory of imagination solves this tension by constructing a scientific account of imagination that is loyal to the leading scientific ideas while ruling out any potential use of imagination in the natural explanation of prophecy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Leviathan, Hobbes outlines the concept of the ‘Kingdome of God by Nature’ or ‘Naturall Kingdome of God’, terms rarely found in English texts at the time. This article traces the concept back to the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which sets forth a threefold understanding of God’s kingdom – the kingdoms of nature, grace, and glory – none of which refer to civil commonwealths on earth. Hobbes abandons this Catholic typology and transforms the concept of the natural kingdom (...) of God to advance a claim often missed by his interpreters: Leviathan-states are the manifestation of a real, not metaphorical, kingdom of God. This argument plays a key role in Leviathan, which identifies the kingdom of God as the Christian doctrine most subject to abuse. Hobbes harshly criticizes Catholic and Presbyterian clergy for claiming to represent God’s kingdom. This claim, he argues, comes with the subversive implication that the church possesses spiritual and temporal authority, and caused great turmoil during the English Civil War. As an alternative, Hobbes points to civil commonwealths as the manifestation of God’s natural kingdom, which is the only form his kingdom currently takes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The concepts of liberty and representation reveal tensions in Hobbes's political anthropology that only a study of the development of his philosophical materialism can fully elucidate. The first section of this article analyses the contradictory definitions of liberty offered in De cive, and explains them against the background of Hobbes's elaboration of a deterministic concept of conatus during the 1640s. Variations in the concepts of conatus and void between De motu and De corpore will shed light on ideas of (...) individuality, unity and agency that carry direct political relevance. The second section explains why the concept of representation that Hobbes elaborated at the end of the decade in Leviathan cannot be interpreted within an exclusively political and juridical framework. Rather, I will claim that it should be explained in the light of Hobbes's materialist theory of the power exerted by the sovereign persona on human imagination. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has cast welcome light on the political relevance of Hobbes’s extensive treatment of theology and sacred history. Building on extant contributions, this article argues that God’s historical founding of a Kingdom lends insights into well-known difficulties attaching to Hobbes’s exposition of the Commonwealth by Institution. Although there are evident discrepancies between sacred history and man's natural estate, Abraham and Moses each faced political challenges that persist into the present. Acting as God’s authorized representatives not only allowed them to (...) assuage epistemic uncertainty, it enabled Moses to wield sovereign authority while preserving a claim to natural equality. I argue that Leviathan suggests this model of prophetic authority – conceived of as a particular kind of prudence – is key to meeting the challenges arising from the anthropological vulnerabilities of ignorance and fear. Hobbes’s interest in the role of founding prophets also helps to explain Leviathan’s novel inclusion of representation. This explication of prophetic authority reveals institution to be marked by a greater attention to legitimacy, epistemic authority, and divine sanction, and sheds light on the importance of sacred history for Hobbes’s broader political project. (shrink)

Hobbes’s account of the sovereign’s right to punish in Leviathan has led to a longstanding interpretive dispute. The debate is prompted by the fact that, prima facie, Hobbes makes two inconsistent claims: subjects (i) authorize all the acts of the sovereign, and are hence authors of their own punishment, yet (ii) have the liberty to resist such punishment. I argue that attending to Hobbes’s surprisingly neglected account of power yields a novel interpretation of his theory of punishment. Hobbes, it turns (...) out, is working with two conceptions of power: potestas, a juridical power, and potentia, a factual power. Each power grounds one of the ‘inconsistent’ claims above: potestas founds the authorized condemnation by the legal system, and potentia the factual enforced penalty, which is not directly authorized and can be resisted. (shrink)

Hobbes is often portrayed as a thinker who anticipated modern constructivist ideas of fiction and representation according to which reality is simply a social construction. This article questions t...

Hobbes and Rousseau relied heavily upon the time-worn metaphor of the body politic to describe and explain their respective political visions. But while Rousseau’s use of the metaphor is largely ac...