The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”: Hobbes on Imagination and Fiction
This is a pre-proof version of the article and is not for citation. The published version is
available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18750257-02702005
Abstract
Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby
contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of
Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the
imaginations of his readers. I elucidate the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s
account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political
philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved
effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of
spiritual darkness. I thus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused
upon his attempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men.
The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body
politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to
transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I
conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract
theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best
understood as imaginary.
Keywords
Thomas Hobbes, imagination, fiction, social contract, eschatology
1
Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby
contrasting it with a natural body.1 In this essay I argue that a central purpose of
Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the
imaginations of his readers. Hobbes first set forth his ideas of fiction and imagination
in the earliest enumeration of his political theory: The Elements of Law. The account
developed there is largely in accord with the corresponding discussion in the opening
chapters of Leviathan, and it is the later work that proved to be Hobbes’s most
comprehensive attempt to shape the imaginations of his seventeenth-century audience.
Hobbes thought that the disturbances and disorders that ravaged England in
the middle of the seventeenth century were predominantly due to men having
mistaken ideas of important concepts. Seditious doctrines flourished as men failed to
understand the proper signification of words like sovereignty and the people, with
erroneous definitions being utilised to promote civil discord.2 Hobbes’s philosophy
started from definitions and throughout he stressed the importance of getting these
right, not only so that civil philosophy could be demonstrated scientifically, much like
geometry, but equally because it was necessary for men to have the right definitions
of words for peace to prevail.
I presented an early draft of this essay to the Hobbes workshop at the 2011 MANCEPT Workshops in
Political Theory. I would like to thank all the participants for their insightful comments, and for written
feedback on earlier drafts I am especially grateful to Laurens van Apeldoorn, Adrian Blau, Timothy
Fowler and the anonymous referees for Hobbes Studies.
1
T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Part I, Human Nature, Part II, De Corpore
Politico; with Three Lives, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), XXI.4.
2
Hobbes long maintained this view; for example compare Elements, XXI.11, XXVII.13, with
Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. F. Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1889),
especially 68–69.
2
For Hobbes, as many scholars have recognised, language and words were of
great consequence.3 Yet the full significance of words cannot be appreciated without
attending to the prominence of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature,
which has received far less scholarly attention.4 Much of the power of words lay in
their ability to cast images that would deeply affect and even transform the
imaginations of their audience. That Hobbes was well aware of the power of images is
clear from the visual importance he accorded to the frontispieces that adorn many of
3
Most comprehensively see P. Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a reading of Hobbes as a precursor of the
linguistic turn, see T. Ball, Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of
Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83–106. The recognition of the importance
of language in Hobbes owes much to the scholarship concerning his use of rhetoric. See principally D.
Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); C. Condren, “On the Rhetorical Foundations of
Leviathan,” History of Political Thought, 11 (1990), 703–720; R. Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy
in Hobbes’s Leviathan (New York: Garland, 1991); Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy
of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); B. Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense
of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 25–54.
4
By far the most comprehensive study is J. Lemetti, Imagination and Diversity in The Philosophy of
Hobbes (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2006). Relatedly see C. Leijenhorst, “Sense and
Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination,” in P.
Springborg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 82–108; T. Butler, Imagination and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 139–179; L. Foisneau, “Elements of Fiction in Hobbes’s System of
Philosophy,” in R. Scholar and A. Tadié (eds.), Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe,
1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 71–86. While not principally addressing the role of imagination,
my thoughts on the topic are greatly indebted to T. Stanton, “Hobbes and Schmitt,” History of
European Ideas, 37 (2011), 160–167.
3
his works.5 Less recognised, however, is the role that Hobbes deemed political and
religious argument to have on shaping the imaginations of men. By bringing his ideas
on the imagination and fiction to the fore, I show both that Hobbes’s political
philosophy depended upon men coming to understand their relationship with the
commonwealth in a certain way, and that Leviathan was itself designed to bring about
the very transformation in their imaginations required to make this understanding
possible.
I proceed by elucidating the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of
human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to
transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas
that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. I thus
advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon his attempt to
dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved
replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of
the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that
men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by
adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and
showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as
imaginary.
Imagination and Fiction
5
Typical here is Horst Bredekamp’s discussion of the force of images in Leviathan, which focuses on
the importance of the frontispiece without considering the wider significance of imagination for
Hobbes’s philosophy; see his “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Leviathan, 29–60. I do not discuss the frontispieces in this essay, but my interpretation complements
their much recognised significance.
4
In both the Elements and Leviathan Hobbes’s political philosophy proceeds from an
account of human nature, or of man, and it is in the former of these works that his
ideas concerning imagination and fiction are presented most clearly. The opening
chapters of the Elements are concerned with the powers of the mind that may be
called cognitive or imaginative, for the understanding of which
we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually
certain images of conceptions of the things without us, insomuch that if a man
could be alive, and all the rest of the world annihilated, he should nevertheless
retain the image thereof, and of all those things which he had before seen and
perceived in it; every man by his own experience knowing that the absence or
destruction of things once imagined, doth not cause the absence or destruction of
the imagination itself. This imagery and representations of the qualities of things
without us is that which we call our cognition, imagination, ideas, notice,
conception, or knowledge of them.6
In short, even if the whole world around us was destroyed we would still have our
imaginations, since our cognition, ideas and knowledge of the world are all based on
the images we have of things. Although Hobbes continued to analyse the different
senses that we possess, it is striking that this passage, as with much of the second
chapter on sense, is so exclusively focused on images and sight. The images we have
of things are simply apparitions of the mind caused by motion, so colour is not
inherent in the object viewed but an effect upon the observer. Hobbes thus concluded,
in opposition to the prevalent Aristotelian view, “that whatsoever accidents or
6
Hobbes, Elements, I.8.
5
qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are
seemings and apparitions only.”7 At this point he turned to examine the imagination.
Hobbes defined imagination as “conception remaining, and by little and little
decaying from and after the act of sense”,8 or more succinctly in Leviathan as
“nothing but decaying sense”.9 The remainder of the chapter is predominantly
concerned with the question of dreams and how they can be distinguished from
original sense. In dreams the imagination restores or recalls sense to the mind with
such clarity that the mind can take notice of nothing but the present. It is primarily
this that distinguishes dreams from waking sense and we should be unsurprised to
find that men are often deceived by taking their past dreams for truth or visions.10
Within the discussion of dreams, Hobbes defined a “FICTION of the mind” as where
the mind “composeth an imagination of divers conceptions that appeared singly to the
sense.” Hobbes provided the example of a gold mountain, which is composed by the
imagination from the independent senses of a mountain and the colour gold. Similar
fictions that appear to us are “castles in the air, chimeras, and other monsters which
are not in rerum natura.”11
A fiction is a composition of things once sensed that is created by the
imagination and which does not correspond to the nature of things, that is, to any
7
Ibid., II.10. On the political importance of combatting Aristotelian theories of sense and imagination
see Leijenhorst, “Sense and Nonsense about Sense,” 98–102.
8
Hobbes, Elements, III.1.
9
T. Hobbes, Leviathan, vols. 2 and 3: The English and Latin Texts, ed. N. Malcolm (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2012), 2.
10
Hobbes, Elements, III.8–10; Leviathan, 30–34. In Leviathan Hobbes placed greater emphasis on
realising the absurdity of dreams while awake, but not the absurdity of waking thoughts while asleep.
11
Hobbes, Elements, III.4; Leviathan, 30.
6
natural body or object. In visual terms, this composition is one of images. In the
following chapter Hobbes considered the succession of conceptions in the mind,
which takes place in the imagination, and allows us to have ideas of the future. From
“our conceptions past, we make a future”,12 which is a form of presumption, or as he
put it in the equivalent section of Leviathan: “the Future [is] but a fiction of the
mind”.13 For Hobbes, then, the future is something we visualise based on our
imaginations and is determined by the images we hold of the present and past.
The role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature is often
understated.14 Greater attention is usually given to the importance of language or
words, which are signs (mutually recognised marks), which enable us to recall to the
mind the conceptions of the thing that is thereby signified. Names and definitions are
types of signs, the use of which distinguishes men from beasts and makes science and
philosophy possible. Words and language are often abused, not least when people use
words that have “no images or conceptions in their minds answering to the words they
speak.”15 Nonetheless, the proper use of language is equally capable of imposing
order and regularity upon men’s disparate imaginations. As the example of dreams
illustrates well, the imaginations of different individuals can vary sharply, making
them particularly difficult to control. The succession of conceptions in the mind
involved in thought is similarly precarious because “in the Imagining of any thing,
there is no certainty what we shall Imagine next.”16 The possibility of effectively
12
Hobbes, Elements, IV.7.
13
Hobbes, Leviathan, 42–44.
14
The most notable exception here is Lemetti, Imagination and Diversity, especially 69–80.
15
Hobbes, Elements, V.14. On the uses and abuses of speech see Leviathan, 48–50; and for extended
analysis see Pettit, Made with Words, 42–97.
16
Hobbes, Leviathan, 38.
7
regulating the imaginations of men depends upon the use of settled definitions that
enable everyone to understand a given word in the same way.
Hobbes defined understanding as “nothing else, but conception caused by
Speech”, which is attained when someone, upon hearing certain words, has the
precise thoughts that those words “were ordained and constituted to signifie”.17 In this
respect, understanding is always shared, for it requires men having the same
conceptions in their minds in response to the utterance of certain words. The power of
language thus stems from its capacity to cast images or conceptions upon the
imaginations of men, which could bring otherwise diverse imaginations into accord.
This would only ever be achieved if words are clearly defined; indeed, Hobbes
claimed that one of the properties of a definition is “that it gives an universal notion of
the thing defined, representing a certain universal picture thereof, not to the eye, but
to the mind.”18 Although it is not clear precisely what Hobbes meant by a “universal
picture”, his idea seems to be that a definition can transmit many images to the mind,
since a word may signify a potentially unlimited number of particular objects which
satisfy its definition.19 To this extent language is of greater force than sight. The
reason why Hobbes was so concerned with defining the proper signification of words,
then, is precisely because words conjure up images that go a long way to determining
17
Ibid., 62.
18
T. Hobbes, De corpore, trans. as Elements of Philosophy. The First Section, Concerning Body, in W.
Molesworth (ed.), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (hereafter EW), 10 vols.
(London: Bohn, 1839–1845), vol. I, I.6.15.
19
Ibid., I.2.9.
8
how we act.20
The imagination is also closely related to man’s passions, which, according to
the account in the Elements, are “the beginning of all his voluntary motions”.21
Hobbes even described many of the passions in terms of the imagination, so glory (the
first passion he defined) proceeds “from the imagination or conception of our own
power”, and, similarly, he defined pity as “imagination or fiction of future calamity to
ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s present calamity”.22 As our
passions flow from our imaginations, Hobbes’s position in the Elements is quite
consistent with that he later formulated in Leviathan, where he stated that “the
Imagination is the first internall beginning of all Voluntary Motion”. Indeed, it is the
role of the imagination that defines all voluntary motion in contradistinction to vital
motion.23
Given the role the imagination serves in his account of human nature, one
would expect it to be of great consequence in Hobbes’s political philosophy as well.
As will become apparent, a central purpose of his philosophy was to guide or even
transform his audience’s imaginations, much as he intimated when invoking one of
his favourite contrasts, averring that “whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe,
from the barbarity of the American savages; is the workmanship of fancy, but guided
by the precepts of true philosophy.”24 Imagination is necessary for people to
20
On this point see also T. Stanton, “Hobbes’s Redefinition of the Commonwealth,” in K. Allen and
T. Stoneham (eds.), Causation and Modern Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 2010),
118–119; idem., “Hobbes and Schmitt,” 165.
21
Hobbes, Elements, V.14.
22
Ibid., IX.1, and IX.10, respectively.
23
Hobbes, Leviathan, 78.
24
T. Hobbes, The Answer to Sir William Davenant’s Preface before “Gondibert”, in EW, IV, 450.
9
understand the world and their relationship with it. This is due to the crucial role it
plays in human understanding as, in a sense, it is all encompassing and cannot be
distinguished from reasoning or deliberation. This is a point that Hobbes admonished
one of his great adversaries, Bishop Bramhall, for failing to appreciate:
He would have known that consideration, understanding, reason, and all the
passions of the mind, are imaginations. That to consider a thing, is to imagine it;
that to understand a thing, is to imagine it; that to hope and fear, are to imagine
the things hoped for and feared.25
Hobbes consistently disparaged those who used words that failed to produce mental
images,26 yet he was equally aware of the damage that could be done by words that
conjured up images or conceptions that would excite men to sedition and to mistake
their rightful sovereign. He was, then, at once concerned to constrain the power of the
imagination in controlling political argument, while at the same time relying on the
imagination to make his philosophy effective, creating a problem that might be
viewed as paradoxical.27 Yet the paradox can easily be explained away. For Hobbes, it
25
T. Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, in EW, V, 358–359; see also
401: “I do indeed conceive that deliberation is an act of imagination or fancy; nay more, that reason
and understanding also are acts of the imagination, that is to say, they are imaginations.” Elsewhere he
claimed that there is no difference between a “thing in the intellect” and “an imaginary thing”. See T.
Hobbes, Thomas White’s ‘De mundo’ examined, trans. H. Whitmoe Jones (London: Bradford
University Press, 1976), IV.1.
26
For instance, after reading Étienne Noël’s Le Plein du vuide, Hobbes complained that “This little
book also contains some expressions which do not produce any mental images of things.” See “Hobbes
to Marin Mersenne, 17 February 1648,” in N. Malcolm (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes,
2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 167.
27
Butler, Imagination and Politics, 142.
10
was simply a fact of political argument that it deeply influences the imaginations and
therewith the beliefs of its audience. While well aware of the dangers of such
argument, he equally appreciated how imperative it was to expound a philosophy that
would cast the right images upon the imaginations of men; these being the images that
would lead them to peace rather than to sedition and civil war.
For Hobbes, philosophy must start from definitions, and the first property of a
definition is to take away all equivocation.28 This is not only a theoretical necessity,
but also of great practical and political import, which is why the sovereign must give
meaning to words and thereby render them unequivocal.29 Much as he advised the
sovereign, Hobbes himself attempted to formulate unequivocal definitions to conjure
up images that would quell civil discord. As Leviathan is a book of words its purpose
was to evoke conceptions in the imaginations of its audience, for, according to
Hobbes, that is simply what words do. Yet his attempt to impress images upon the
minds of his readers permeates far deeper. Before analysing the way Hobbes sought to
cast the fiction of the body politic upon his audience, I first examine that which he
deemed of equal importance: the evisceration of the false images promulgated by dark
and vain philosophy.
Enlightenment from Spiritual Darkness
As early as the Elements, Hobbes devoted much of his discussion of the imagination
to the topic of dreams and how we are deceived when we mistake them for reality. In
28
Hobbes, Concerning Body, I.6.15.
29
T. Hobbes, De cive, trans. as On the Citizen, ed. R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), VI.9.
11
the second chapter of Leviathan, however, the rhetorical force and political
significance of this deception is made far more explicit:
If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques
from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by
which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much
more fitted than they are for civill Obedience.30
The final part of Leviathan is reserved for enlightening men from the kingdom of
darkness disseminated by “a Confederacy of Deceivers”,31 yet, as the passage
illustrates, this theme is anticipated throughout the work. The belief in sprits, ghosts
and prophesies was surprisingly widespread during the middle of the seventeenth
century, with Anglican ministers actively encouraging the proliferation of ghost
stories to confute the materialism, mortalism and (alleged) atheism associated with
Leviathan. The links between beliefs in ghosts and religious faith were emphasised to
support ideas of the immortality of the soul, bodily resurrection, and the authority of
the Holy Trinity.32 Hobbes’s heterodox theology challenged all these ideas (among
many others), which he thought weakened or tended to the dissolution of the
commonwealth. He thus chided those who set up “another Kingdome, as it were a
Kingdome of Fayries, in the dark”, for as soon as the spiritual kingdom is opposed to
30
Hobbes, Leviathan, 34; see also Concerning Body, IV.25.9. Similarly, Hobbes later recounted stories
of how the “dreams and prognostications” of false prophets excited sedition during the Long
Parliament, Behemoth, 187–188.
31
Hobbes, Leviathan, 956.
32
S. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century
England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), especially 16–17, 26–28. See also P. Marshall, Mother
Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 217–220.
12
the temporal one the danger of civil war is imminent, precisely “because the fear of
Darknesse, and Ghosts, is greater than other fears”.33
Recall that to fear, for Hobbes, is to imagine the thing feared. The kingdom of
darkness is one in which men’s fear leads to the dissemination of seditious opinions
and finally to civil war. In De corpore Hobbes wrote of “how hard a thing it is to
weed out of men’s minds such inveterate opinions as have taken root there, and been
confirmed in them by the authority of most eloquent writers”.34 To do so it was
necessary to transform his audience’s imaginations by effacing the dark images from
the minds of men so that peace could be secured. Although Hobbes was at his most
polemical in attempting this in the fourth part of Leviathan, the foundations of his
critique were laid in the preceding part, concerning the Christian commonwealth.
Much of the third part of Leviathan was aimed at dethroning the false ideas
that men have of certain theological concepts. The central chapters, which are
concerned with the proper signification of words found in Holy Scripture, serve the
purpose of demystification. One of the most pernicious false beliefs propagated by the
schoolmen was that spirits are incorporeal substances. For Hobbes, such speech was
absurd as incorporeal signifies without body and substance signifies body; these
words, therefore, “when they are joined together, destroy one another”. The proper
signification of spirit is either an invisible substance or a “Phantasme of the
Imagination”.35 Hobbes did not deny the existence of spirits, but by reducing them to
either material phenomena or phantasms of the mind—that is, dreams—the evocative
imagery associated with them could be displaced. In such cases to explain was to
33
Hobbes, Leviathan, 510.
34
Hobbes, Concerning Body, I.1.1.
35
Hobbes, Leviathan, 610–630.
13
explain away the false conceptions that occupied men’s minds.36
The most prominent misconceptions that men held, however, concerned
eschatology. To purge men’s minds of these Hobbes began by arguing that the
kingdom of God is not a metaphorical term and signifies a real and terrestrial
kingdom. It should not be taken to signify eternal felicity or a higher heaven. Instead,
“by the Kingdome of God, is properly meant a Common-wealth, instituted (by the
consent of those which were to be subject thereto) for their Civill Government”.37 Not
only is the kingdom of God to be found on Earth, but the imagery Hobbes evoked is
that of a civil commonwealth, which he had spent the first half of Leviathan
developing. Similarly, when Hobbes proceeded to discuss the signification of eternal
life and Hell, he did so in relation to the problem of maintaining civil society:
It is impossible a Common-wealth should stand, where any other than the
Soveraign, hath a power of giving greater rewards than Life; and of inflicting
greater punishments, than Death. Now seeing Eternall life is a greater reward,
than the life present; and Eternall torment a greater punishment than the death of
Nature; It is a thing worthy to be well considered, of all men that desire (by
obeying Authority) to avoid the calamities of Confusion, and Civill war, what is
meant by holy Scripture, by Life Eternall, and Torment Eternall38
36
For extended discussion on this point, see K. Schuhmann, “Phantasms and Idols: True Philosophy
and Wrong Religion in Hobbes,” in L. Foisneau and G. Wright (eds.), Nuove prospettive critiche sul
Leviatano di Hobbes (Milan: F. Angeli, 2004), 25–31.
37
Hobbes, Leviathan, 640.
38
Ibid., 698. Hobbes later made the point even more succinctly: to the extent that men believe that
“eternal torture is more terrible than death, so much they would fear the clergy more than the King.”
Behemoth, 14–15.
14
Just as eternal life, or Heaven, is real and on Earth, so too the “Enemy, and his
Kingdome must be on Earth also.” Hobbes insisted that the images associated with
eternal torment, such as the lake of fire, should be taken only as metaphorical. There
is no eternal life for the condemned. Instead, everlasting death is simply a second
death.39 The images of eternal suffering and torment that men so fear, leading them to
disobey their sovereign in the name of religion, cannot be supported by an appeal to
Scripture; rather they are conceptions conjured up by others to incite sedition. Hobbes
repudiated the image of everlasting suffering in the lake of fire and other heathen
images of Hell and, in so doing, reduced the fear of eternal torment to nothing more
than fear of a second death. Hobbes’s aim was to eradicate the images employed by
religious authorities over men as instruments of fear and power, a purpose which
Bishop Bramhall surmised well when he exclaimed that Hobbes “hath killed the great
infernal Devil, and all his black angels, and left no devils to be feared, but devils
incarnate, that is, wicked men.”40
This theme is continued as Hobbes turned to consider the kingdom of darkness
and the spiritual darkness arising from the misinterpretation of Scripture. The
confusion of mistaking second death for eternal torment is compounded by the view
that all men have an immortal and immaterial soul, whereas the soul rather signifies
the life of a living creature.41 The belief in incorporeal spirits is closely related to the
belief in demons. Hobbes attributed this belief to the Greeks, although the Jews
shared in the opinion “concerning Phantasmes, namely, that they were not
39
Hobbes, Leviathan, 716; a point he reiterated forcefully in the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan,
1160.
40
J. Bramhall, cited in T. Hobbes, An Answer to Bishop Bramhall’s Book, called “The Catching of the
Leviathan”, in EW, IV, 356.
41
Hobbes, Leviathan, 972–976.
15
Phantasmes, that is, Idols of the braine, but things reall, and independent on the
Fancy.”42 What is more, the very reason why the ancients confused images of the
fancy for real spirits and idols was because they had failed to discover the true nature
of sight.43 Hobbes, then, considered that it was precisely due to his refutation of the
scholastic understanding of sense and imagination that he was uniquely able to reveal
demons and false idols to be nothing more than phantasms.
Some commentators have recently argued that Hobbes’s mortalism can be
explained as part of his attempt to apply his materialist metaphysics to religious
interpretation in the second half of Leviathan.44 While it is true that Hobbes reduced
spirits to material phenomena, this fails to capture the full force of what he sought to
achieve. The reason why the notions of incorporeal spirits and eternal suffering
needed to be refuted was because of the images that such words conjured up in the
minds of their audience, which could excite them to rebel against the temporal
sovereign. The rejection of the idea of everlasting suffering in a lake of fire was not
necessitated by his materialist metaphysics, but, instead, by the importance he placed
on displacing such images from the imaginations of men, which greatly influenced
their behaviour. It was not only Hobbes’s materialism that informed his religious
42
Ibid., 1016. Hobbes used the language of fiction to make the same point elsewhere: ‘The other sorts
of devils are called in the Scripture dæmonia, which are the feigned Gods of the heathen, and are
neither bodies nor spiritual substances, but mere fancies, and fictions of terrified hearts, feigned by the
Greeks and other heathen people.’ Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 211.
43
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1012.
44
J. Overhoff, Hobbes’s Theory of the Will: Ideological Reasons and Historical Circumstances
(Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 192–211; E. Brandon, The Coherence of
Hobbes’s Leviathan: Civil and Religious Authority Combined (London: Continuum, 2007), 58–74. But
cf. D. Johnston, “Hobbes’s Mortalism,” History of Political Thought, 10 (1989), 647–663.
16
interpretation, then, but rather, much as he indicated, his anti-Aristotelian
understanding of sight and imagination and therewith the great significance that he
accorded to the power of images.
For Hobbes, the authors of “this Darknesse in Religion, are the Romane, and the
Presbyterian Clergy”, who sought to attain “a Soveraign Power over the People” by
disseminating the false belief that the church on Earth is the kingdom of God from the
Old Testament.45 In Leviathan Hobbes’s scorn was most memorably directed at the
Pope and the Roman Clergy, whose doctrines were not derived from Scripture but
from heathen philosophy in general and Aristotle in particular. This was further
propagated by the universities and the schoolmen, yet such natural philosophy “was
rather a Dream than Science”.46 Having displaced the imagery evoked by their
philosophy, Hobbes was at his most sardonic, famously claiming that the Papacy
may be compared not unfitly to the Kingdome of Fairies; that is, to the old
wives Fables in England, concerning Ghosts and Spirits, and the feats they play
in the night… as the Fairies have no existence, but in the Fancies of ignorant
people, rising from the Traditions of old Wives, or old Poets: so the Spirituall
Power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own Civill Dominion) consisteth
onely in the Fear that Seduced people stand in, of their Excommunications; upon
hearing of false Miracles, false Traditions, and false Interpretations of
Scripture.47
The final part of Leviathan abounds with imagery. Hobbes’s purpose was to show that
45
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1106.
46
Ibid., 1058; see also Behemoth, 41–43.
47
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1118–1122.
17
Aristotelian philosophy is but a dream, and to awaken his audience from the ensuing
nightmare of spiritual darkness emanating from Rome. The image cast upon the
minds of readers when they read of the Papacy is no longer one of spiritual authority
but rather the comically ridiculous one of the kingdom of fairies. Although the Roman
church here provided the main object of Hobbes’s ridicule, he maintained that
Presbyterian ministers were at least as culpable for encouraging the sedition that led
to civil war. In the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, he wrote that the cause of the
civil war “was nothing other than the quarrelling, first between the Roman Church
and the Anglican, and then within the Anglican Church between the Episcopalian and
Presbyterian pastors, about theological issues.”48 By the time of Behemoth, his wrath
was chiefly reserved for the Presbyterian ministers, whose seditious doctrine “has
been stuck so far into the people’s heads and memories… that I fear the
commonwealth will never be cured.”49 Hobbes considered both the Roman clergy and
the Presbyterian ministers to be the authors of religious darkness because they
claimed for their churches a power greater than that of the sovereign, whereas peace
could never be secured unless men came to understand that the authority of religion
derives solely from the laws of the commonwealth promulgated by the sovereign.50
Hobbes’s aim, then, was to correct men’s vision, for “Temporall and Spirituall
Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and
mistake their Lawfull Soveraign.”51 The final two parts of Leviathan attempted to
48
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1226.
49
Hobbes, Behemoth, 57.
50
Ibid., 46.
51
Hobbes, Leviathan, 732–734. As early as 1641 Hobbes had written that the dispute between the
spiritual and civil powers has been the main “cause of ciuill warres, in all places of Christendome”. See
“Hobbes to William Cavendish, 23 July 1641,” in Correspondence, 120.
18
clear away all the false doctrines that might make men mistake their obligation to the
civil sovereign for obligation to a false sovereign in the name of religion. According
to Hobbes, all that is required for salvation is the inward belief that Jesus is the
Christ.52 One purpose of reducing Christianity to this single article of faith was to
allow the sovereign the right to determine the proper forms of public worship,53 which
could serve an important civic role.54 One way of doing this, however, was to develop
a new civil imagery that could take the place of the religious imagery that he hoped to
root out from the minds of men.
Hobbes maintained the incomprehensibility of God and thought that the words
we use to signify His attributes may be only superlatives or negatives; words that
signify our inability to conceive of Him.55 As we can have no images of anything
infinite, “there can bee no Image of God; nor of the Soule of Man; nor of Spirits”.56
The incomprehensibility of God ceases not only to make Him a proper object for
philosophical or scientific inquiry, but equally strips away any images associated with
Him as an object of fear. If to fear is to fear that which is imagined, and we can
attribute to God only negatives or superlatives, then we may come to realise that the
picture we fear is clouded in obscurity, or even empty. Once the images of demons
and eternal torment have been displaced from the minds of men, the space is open for
Hobbes to impress upon them the fiction of the body politic. Hobbes denied that we
can have an image of the immortal God, but in His place, and under His name,
52
Hobbes, Leviathan, 938.
53
See G.M. Vaughan, Behemoth Teaches Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 68–69.
54
Hobbes, Leviathan, 176–178, 570–572.
55
Ibid., 46, 160, 564–566; Concerning Body, IV.26.1; ‘De mundo’ examined, XXVII.1.
56
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1030.
19
Hobbes sought to conjure up the imagery of the commonwealth, the temporal
kingdom and the mortal God:
This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more
reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortall God, our
peace and defence.57
If Hobbes had been confident of men’s ability to use their natural reason to arrive at
the truths of civil science themselves it may have been sufficient for him to have
cleared away the insidious imagery that so obtruded their judgment. Yet this is only
half the story of Leviathan. While effacing the imagery propagated by the schoolmen
and ecclesiastics, Hobbes also sought to ingrain a new imagery: the imagery of the
mortal God and the mighty Leviathan.
The Fiction of the Body Politic
The most significant debate about the role of fiction in Hobbes’s political philosophy
concerns whether or not the sovereign should be said to represent the state by fiction.
It is thus worth considering this question briefly, while keeping in mind that the
discussion has been principally concerned with understanding Hobbes’s notions of
authorisation, representation and persons (and not fiction or imagination). Quentin
Skinner argues that the sovereign is importantly not a fiction but a “purely artificial”
person.58 In reply, David Runciman contends that Hobbes’s state is best understood as
57
Ibid., 260.
58
Q. Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” The Journal of Political
Philosophy, 7 (1999), 1–29.
20
a “person by fiction”, and that what Hobbes meant by a “person by fiction” is actually
what Skinner means by a “purely artificial” person.59 The analysis rests primarily on
the opening lines of Chapter XVI of Leviathan:
A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or
as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to
whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction.
When they are considered as his owne, then he is called a Naturall Person: And
when they are considered as representing the words and actions of an other, then
he is a Feigned or Artificiall person.60
Hobbes used the term fiction on one other occasion in the chapter where he claimed
that there are a few things “uncapable of being represented by Fiction.” After listing
some inanimate objects, he clarified that these things are incapable of being
personated only “before there be some state of Civill Government.”61 This, however,
sheds little light on precisely what it means to be represented by fiction. Runciman
attempts to translate the opening passage and infers that among all feigned and
artificial persons there is a distinction between those who represent others truly and
those who do so by fiction.62 Yet it is by no means evident that this is the meaning that
59
D. Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” The Journal of
Political Philosophy, 8 (2000), 268–278.
60
Hobbes, Leviathan, 244.
61
Ibid., 246.
62
Runciman, “What Kind of Person?” 269–270. The idea that representation by fiction applies to only
artificial and not to natural persons also appears to be accepted by Monica Brito Vieira when she
equates representation by fiction with representation of a non-person; see her The Elements of
Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes’s
21
Hobbes intended the passage to convey. The distinction between being represented
truly or by fiction applies to both natural and feigned, or artificial, persons, since a
natural person is represented providing his words are considered as his own, which
could either be truly (considered so because they really are his own) or by fiction
(only considered as his own). This point is especially significant as it opens up the
possibility that the individuals who covenant to generate sovereignty could be natural
persons whose words are considered to be represented by the person of the sovereign.
These persons do not truly covenant, they are just considered to do so by fiction; a
point to which I return in the conclusion.
Somewhat surprisingly, what the exchange is lacking is a clear definition of
“fiction”. Both Skinner and Runciman also consider the corresponding chapter from
the Latin Leviathan and, perhaps more promisingly, Chapter XV of De homine,
entitled “De homine fictitio”. However, as Skinner’s and Runciman’s analyses are
focused on representation and the person of the state, they have no recourse to
Hobbes’s earlier works, since the theory of authorisation and personation was
introduced only in Leviathan. This provides for an incomplete understanding of
Hobbes’s ideas on fiction, as even if the idea of a person being represented by fiction
is original to Leviathan, the idea that the body politic is itself a fictitious body is
developed in the Elements.63 Indeed, the question of whether or not Hobbes viewed
the sovereign as representing the state by fiction may be analysed independently to
that of whether the body politic itself should be understood as a fictitious body. It is to
Theory of the State (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 153–158.
63
Yet scholars who have considered that the body politic is a fictitious body have tended to focus on
Leviathan; see Lucien Jaume, “La Théorie de la “Personne Fictive” dans le Léviathan de Hobbes,”
Revue française de science politique, 33 (1983). 1009–1035; C.D. Tarlton, “Leviating Leviathan:
Glosses on a Theme in Hobbes,” Ethics, 88 (1977), 8.
22
the latter question I now turn.
When discussing the nature of different types of commonwealths in the
Elements, Hobbes explicitly claimed that “a body politic, as it is a fictitious body, so
are the faculties and will thereof fictitious also”.64 The term fictitious body is here
used in contradistinction to a natural body. In his later works Hobbes more frequently
drew the distinction between a natural and an artificial body and there is some
similarity between artifice and fiction. Both artificial and fictitious bodies signify
something created by man, yet it is the latter term alone that evokes the idea that the
creation exists only in the imaginations of men. For example, neither a chair nor a
gold mountain is a natural body, but the former is an artificial body, whereas the latter
is a fictitious body. A fiction is a composition of different images or conceptions that
takes place in the mind. The body politic is not a body that exists in rerum natura.
Instead, the image of a multitude of men is combined with the image of a unified
human body, and it is this that gives the commonwealth its unity and transforms a
multitude into one person. The same is true of the will of the body politic. The
importance, for Hobbes, is that a disparate multitude can be conceived of as a unified
person with a unified will. To claim that the body politic is a fictitious body, then, is to
claim that it exists only in the imaginations of men. The unity of the fictitious person
exists only so long as men imagine it to exist. To recognise this is to appreciate just
how fragile Hobbes considered the unity of the body politic to be, yet, as disquieting
as this conclusion might at first appear, it coheres well with what he sought to achieve
throughout his political philosophy. The reason why the image of the sovereign is so
authoritative is precisely because the reality of political power is so precarious. The
sovereign power is quite literally, and only, “as great, as possibly men can be
64
Hobbes, Elements, XXI.4.
23
imagined to make it.”65
One reason for showing that the body politic is a fictitious body in the
Elements is to pre-empt any suggestion that the use of fiction and imagery in
Leviathan is just introduced to give rhetorical embellishment to Hobbes’s considered
philosophical view. On the contrary, his analysis of the imagination leads to the
conclusion that the body politic is a fictitious body and this is equally true of
Leviathan as it is of the Elements. This being the case, it might be asked why Hobbes
described the body politic as only an artificial and not a fictitious body in the later
recensions of his political theory. One possible answer is that Hobbes’s works were
intended for different audiences and he never authorised the publication of the
Elements. Whereas his earlier works were designed to shape public opinion only
through intermediaries, Leviathan was also intended to do so directly.66 It was the
readers of Leviathan whose imaginations needed to be affected. Instead of defining
the body politic as a fictitious body in Leviathan, which would draw attention to its
fragility, Hobbes was more concerned with imprinting the fiction of the body politic
upon the minds of his readers, and so focused on developing the images to ensure that
this could be achieved. Indeed, the very idea that the body politic is only a fictitious
body might prove insidious if appropriated by those who would rather use it to excite
sedition than to move men towards peace.
Hobbes’s attempt to shape the imaginations of his audience permeates
Leviathan. Todd Butler has stressed the effect that his discussion of punishment was
intended to have upon men’s imaginations, which would help to form opinion through
65
Hobbes, Leviathan, 320.
66
See Johnston, Rhetoric, 89.
24
the use of rewards and harms.67 This draws attention to the importance of directing
men’s imaginations towards the proper object of fear, the most prominent example of
which is actually Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature. The state of nature is
portrayed in such a way that men will conceive there to be nothing more miserable
than living without civil laws. As I have already shown, Hobbes displaced the images
of everlasting suffering in Hell from his eschatology, and nowhere, according to
Hobbes, do men suffer more than in the state of nature, the fear of returning to which
should pervade their imaginations the moment they entertain notions of disobedience
or rebellion.68
The most imposing image that Hobbes adopted in Leviathan, however, is that
of the sovereign himself, or the mortal God, for it was this that would help men to
understand their relationship with the commonwealth. Where the immortal God is
incomprehensible, Hobbes’s mortal God is accompanied by the most vivid imagery,
as the frontispiece to Leviathan attests. Hobbes averred that “in a larger use of the
word Image, is contained also, any Representation of one thing by another. So an
earthly Soveraign may be called the Image of God”,69 and it was this image that he
was most concerned to impress upon his readers’ minds. For Hobbes, in fact, the
67
Butler, Imagination and Politics, 164–165. According to Hobbes, punishment is an example that
frames and necessitates the will towards virtue, Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 177.
68
Cf. Richard Tuck, who argues that a central purpose of Hobbes’s eschatology (and even his whole
philosophy) was to relieve men of fear; see his “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” in N.
Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourses in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 131–132. My account supports Tuck’s interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology,
but differs in so far as Hobbes’s aim was to redirect the object of men’s fear to the state of nature,
rather than to relieve them from fear completely.
69
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1032.
25
fiction of the body politic is not just a composition of images in the strict sense. He
attached the imagery of the sovereign to the word God, while arguing that we are
unable to conceive of the immortal God. Given that we can have no image of the
immortal God, Hobbes hoped that that men might come to associate the word God
with the image of the sovereign, as a mortal God. In this respect, the images that men
have of the mortal God would be attached to the ideas they associate with the
immortal God. According to Hobbes, the obligation that men have to God follows
from his irresistible power and man’s corresponding weakness, and to question such
power is to commit injustice.70 If the sovereign is imagined to be a mortal God then
men will come to think of him as irresistible and protection will be secured. Strictly
speaking, of course, he is never irresistible, as men always retain their right of selfpreservation. This right, however, entails no corresponding obligation on the part of
the sovereign and, given how fearful men should be of returning to the state of nature
with other men, Hobbes deemed it best not even to conceive of entering into the state
of nature with the sovereign.
Earlier I discussed Hobbes’s presentation of the kingdom of God, but now the
analogy with his mortal God should be all the more apparent. Even though the
obligation men have to God flows from his irresistible power, the Kingdom of God is
a commonwealth instituted by consent, so “God is King of all the Earth by his Power:
but of his chosen people, he is King by Covenant.”71 Hobbes insisted that the
kingdom of God on Earth will not return until the second coming of Christ, but the
fiction that he cast of the mighty Leviathan might appear to be a close approximation.
Ironically, men living under such a mortal God could be deceived into thinking that
70
Hobbes, On the Citizen, XV.7; Leviathan, 558; Of Liberty and Necessity, 250.
71
Hobbes, Leviathan, 180, 636–638.
26
the kingdom of God has come; the very opinion that Hobbes thought so seditious
when promulgated by a confederacy of deceivers.72 Yet whereas in rebellious hands
the doctrine may be used to excite sedition, the imagery that Hobbes evoked sought
only to quell discord and move men to obedience.
Conclusion
In this essay I have revealed the importance of imagination and fiction to Hobbes’s
philosophy and argued that the body politic should be understood as a fictitious body.
To conclude, I return to the idea of representation by fiction and adumbrate some of
its implications for understanding Hobbes’s account of the form of contract involved
in generating a commonwealth. In doing so, my aim is to re-orientate the way his
social contract theory is approached, although I do not develop a comprehensive
reinterpretation of that theory here.
Hobbes claimed that natural persons can be represented either truly or by fiction,
and in the latter case men may be considered to covenant by fiction. A fictitious
covenant is not one that actually happened at some historical point in time. Instead, if
the covenant is fictitious, individuals need only to be considered as having laid down
certain rights to the sovereign, for by understanding their relationship with the
sovereign in this way they in fact do consent to being governed by the sovereign.
Hobbes made clear on numerous occasions that by accepting protection men
consent and are thereby obligated.73 In the terminology of Leviathan such consent is a
72
Ibid., 1112.
73
Hobbes employed the concept of silent consent in Elements, xiii.11; implied consent in On the
Citizen, XIV.12; contract by inference in Leviathan, 1133–1135; and defended himself on the point
27
sign “by Inference”, which is a sign of the will that may be inferred from an
individual’s actions of forbearances.74 When describing the covenant that unites a
multitude into a person, Hobbes claimed that it is “as if every man should say to every
man” that he lays down his right of governing himself and authorises all the actions of
the sovereign.75 In thinking of themselves as if they have covenanted to generate the
commonwealth, individuals really do consent to give up their right of governing
themselves to the sovereign. At this stage reality and fiction become one.76 The reality
of protection is associated with the fiction of the covenant and men consent to the
sovereign’s power at the very point that they imagine themselves to have done so.
One of Hobbes’s contemporary critics, the Earl of Clarendon, was unwittingly close
to the mark when he commented that, for Hobbes, the “institution of Soveraignty is a
mere imagination”.77 Unbeknown to Clarendon, however, Hobbes had anticipated this
type of objection and had a rejoinder ready in waiting elsewhere:
Let no-one interrupt that ‘mere imagination’ is nothing; for imaginary motions,
inasmuch as they are imaginary, do not have the existence they seem to have. In
someone imagining, however, they are real, for ‘the imagination of motion’ is
the same as ‘motion in him who imagines’.78
against Bramhall in Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 180.
74
Hobbes, Leviathan, 204.
75
Ibid., 260, my emphasis.
76
This reading thus explains away the paradox in Hobbes’s theory of authorisation—between real and
fictitious unity—identified by P. Springborg, “The Paradoxical Hobbes,” Political Theory, 37 (2009),
683–684. Also cf. B. Gert, Hobbes: Prince of Peace (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 133.
77
E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to
church and state in Mr. Hobbes’s book entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 49.
78
Hobbes, ‘De mundo’ examined, XXVIII.2.
28
Hobbes’s point was in relation to the imagination of time, which is the mental image
of motion. However, as for Hobbes everything was matter in motion, it is not too
incongruous to extend the point to his treatment of the institution of sovereignty. To
recast Hobbes’s claim in line with this interpretation, then, the last sentence would
read: In someone imagining however they are real, for “the imagination of consenting
(or covenanting)” is the same as “consent in him who imagines”. The consent and
covenant involved in Hobbes’s account of the generation of sovereignty is best
understood as imaginary.79 That the covenant is imaginary, however, does not mean
that it, and the obligation it generates, are not real, because, for Hobbes at least, real
and imaginary were not antonyms. On this reading, then, men do not actually ever
take place in a covenant but they come to conceive of themselves as if they had done
so.80
Throughout his writings Hobbes recognised the power of opinion; indeed, in
Behemoth he wrote that “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the
opinion and belief of the people.”81 Political power rested on the ability to change the
opinion men have of the world, as to do so was to change the reality of the world
itself.82 Given Hobbes’s epistemology, however, men’s opinions and beliefs could be
79
See also G. Newey, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hobbes and Leviathan (London and New
York: Routledge, 2008), 121–123, 146–147. This interpretation of the covenant as imaginary is
different to hypothetical accounts of the social contract where the contract is treated merely as a
thought experiment, a point worth noting given that Hobbes is often read as a hypothetical contract
theorist.
80
See also Stanton, “Hobbes and Schmitt,” 165–166.
81
Hobbes, Behemoth, 16; see also Elements, XII.6; On the Citizen, VI.11; Leviathan, 380.
82
See Johnston, Rhetoric, 70; Butler, Imagination and Politics, 170; Stanton, “Hobbes and Schmitt,”
29
transformed only by affecting their imaginations. According to Hobbes, “civil
philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves.”83 Yet
the way in which we make it is by imagining it, for the commonwealth is a fictitious
body and its unity and strength are no more than men imagine them to be. It is
therefore essential that men have the right images to correspond to their passions. If
men fear the image of the state of nature more than eternal suffering then peace may
be secured. If they conceive of their obligation to the immortal God as aligned with
their obligation to the mortal God then they see clearly. Hobbes hoped for a time
when Leviathan would be taught in the universities.84 He looked to the future and the
future is “but a fiction of the mind”.85 Yet the future is determined by what men
imagine it to be. Men need to have an image of the future that would guide their
action and it was this that Hobbes sought to provide. Hobbes wrote in a time when
peace was little more than a fiction and in Leviathan he supplied the images that
needed to be cast upon the minds of men if that fiction was ever to become a lasting
reality.
166.
83
T. Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics, in EW, VII, 185.
84
Hobbes, Leviathan, 574.
85
Ibid., 44.
30