![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The paper examines Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the state and representation in light of the historical development of the idea of the people as a corporation and its use in late-medieval and early-modern theories of resistance. Consequently, it is argued that Hobbes’s use of a corporate metaphor for the state embodied a rejection of the ius gentium reading of the people as a corporate body that legitimised the right of resistance to the sovereign power. By incorporating the state, not the people, and championing a single covenant of a dissociated multitude that leads to its generation, Hobbes undermined the basis on which advocates of popular sovereignty justified opposition to the sovereign; a prerogative derived in their eyes from a covenant between the people and the ruler.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Quentin Skinner and Andrew Fitzmaurice for reviewing an earlier version of this manuscript, as well as George Garnett, who provided me with a few helpful comments regarding the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos. My thanks must also go to the two anonymous reviewers from the Charles Schmitt Essay Prize to which an earlier draft of this paper had been submitted, as well as the anonymous reviewer for the journal, whose thoughtful and constructive feedback helped me clarify my own thoughts on some of the issues tackled in the paper. Most importantly, however, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Krzysztof Kubala, who has made—and continues to make—all my academic work possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Runciman’s exposition of the fictional theory originates in: Ruciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State. Quentin Skinner had argued that Hobbes’s state is a ‘purely artificial person’ in: Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State’, Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): 1–29, matching Arto Tukiainen’s description of the Hobbesian commonwealth as an ‘artificial person’ in: Arto Tukiainen, ‘The Commonwealth as a Person in Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Hobbes Studies 7 (1994): 44–55. Runciman objected to these claims, replying that Leviathan is instead a ‘person by fiction’ in: David Runciman, ‘What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner’, Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 268–78. Skinner conceded the point to Runciman, but initially mischaracterised the Hobbesian state as a ‘purely fictional Person’ in: Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Representation’, European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2, 178. He has since accepted Runciman’s argument, albeit filtering the ‘person by fiction’ through Quintilian’s notion of a persona fictione, as described in: Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 8. Lars Vinx concurs with Skinner’s original position and argues that the state for Hobbes is an ‘artificial person that is closely analogous to natural persons’ in: Lars Vinx, ‘Personality, Authority, and Self-Esteem in Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Intellectual History Review 32, no. 1 (2022): 135–55. Monica Brito Vieira, Adam Lindsay, and Jerónimo Rilla subscribe to Runciman’s interpretation in: Monica Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes’s Theory of the State (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Monica Brito Vieira, ‘Making Up and Making Real’, Global Intellectual History 5, no. 3 (2020): 310–28; Adam Lindsay, ‘“Pretenders of a Vile and Unmanly Disposition”: Thomas Hobbes on the Fiction of Constituent Power’, Political Theory 47, no. 4 (2019): 475–99; Jerónimo Rilla, ‘Hobbes and Prosopopoeia’, Intellectual History Review (2021): 1–22. Ben Holland adopts Runciman’s view, but occasionally describes Hobbes’s state as a ‘fictional person’ in: Ben Holland, The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities (Cambridge: CUP, 2017). Henry Turner and Johan Olsthoorn parse Runciman’s reading through a corporate lens in: Henry Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651 (Chicago, IL: UCP, 2016); Johan Olsthoorn, ‘Leviathan Inc.: Hobbes on the Nature and Person of the State’, History of European Ideas 47, no. 1 (2021): 17–32. Arash Abizadeh and Sean Fleming build on Runciman’s reading by suggesting that Hobbes’s state is an ‘artificial person by fiction’ in: Arash Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person By Fiction’, The Historical Journal 60 (2017): 915–41; Sean Fleming, ‘The Two Faces of Personhood: Hobbes, Corporate Agency and the Personality of the State’, European Journal of Political Theory (2017): 5–26; Sean Fleming, Leviathan on a Leash: A Theory of State Responsibility (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2020). Glen Newey disputed Runciman’s interpretation of a ‘person by fiction’ by countering that Leviathan could be understood as a natural or ‘public person’ in: Glen Newey, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hobbes and Leviathan (London: Routledge, 2008), 112–3. Paul Sagar contests that Leviathan is a person at all in: Paul Sagar, ‘What is the Leviathan?’ Hobbes Studies 31, no. 1 (2018): 75–92.
2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 246. The notable exceptions to this neglect can be found in: Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth; Olsthoorn, ‘Leviathan Inc.’
3 Hobbes, Leviathan, 16.
4 Karl Olivecrona, Three Essays in Roman Law (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1949), 21; Jeffrey L. Patterson, ‘The Development of the Concept of Corporation from Earliest Roman Times to A.D. 476’, The Accounting Historians Journal 10, no. 1 (1983): 87–98.
5 Seneca, Natural Questions, Books 1-3, trans. Thomas H. Corcoran (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1971), 103, 107.
6 Seneca, Natural Questions, Books 1-3, 103–5.
7 Seneca, Epistles, Volume III: Epistles 93-124, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1925), 171.
8 The Digest of Justinian Vol. 4, ed. Alan Watson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1985), 31.
9 Ibid., 36.
10 Digest Vol. 4, 36. The flock would remain an enduring archetype for canvassing corporate ontology, e.g. Bracton’s use. See: Ted Powell, ‘Body Politic and Body Corporate in the Fifteenth Century: the Case of the Duchy of Lancaster’, Political Society in Later Medieval England: A Festschrift for Christine Carpenter, ed. Benjamin Thompson and John Watts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), 169. See also: The Digest of Justinian Vol. 1, ed. Alan Watson (Philadelphia, PA: UPP, 1985), 205.
11 Digest Vol. 1, 97.
12 William H. Rattigan, Jural. Relations; or, the Roman Law of Persons as Subjects of Jural Relations (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1884), 181.
13 Digest Vol. 1, 97–8.
14 Rattigan, Jural Relations, 249.
15 See also: Roger Scruton and John Finnis, ‘Corporate Persons’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 63, no. 1 (1989): 242.
16 The Digest of Justinian Vol. 2, ed. Alan Watson (Philadelphia, PA: UPP, 1985), 51.
17 For example, the political thought of Baldus de Ubaldi and the anonymous Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos. On Baldus, see: Joseph Canning, ‘The Corporation in the Political Thought of the Italian Jurists of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, History of Political Thought 1, no. 1 (1980); Joseph Canning, ‘Ideas of the State in Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Commentators on the Roman Law’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983); Joseph Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus di Ubaldis (Cambridge: CUP, 1987); Joseph Canning, ‘Kantorowicz’s Interpretation of Baldus’ Corporation Theory in the Light of Later Research’, in Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963) Political History as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Thomas Frank and Daniela Rando (Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2015). On the Vindiciae, see: Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos or, Concerning the Legitimate Power of a Prince Over the People, and of the People Over a Prince, ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), esp. xxiii–xxvii, 38–9, 47–8.
18 Digest Vol. 1, 96.
19 Frederick William Maitland in: Otto von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. Frederic William Maitland (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), xxx.
20 Digest Vol. 4, 307. Watson translates collegium as ‘association’ rather than ‘corporation.’
21 Rattigan, Jural Relations, 205.
22 Ibid., 206.
23 Digest Vol. 1, 2. Watson translates ‘gentes’ as ‘nations.’ I have replaced this word with the more appropriate ‘peoples.’ For Baldus’s use of D.1.1.5, see: Canning, ‘The Corporation’, 22. On the corporate resistance theory developed by the Italian post-Glossators in general, see: Canning, ‘The Corporation’; Canning, ‘Ideas of the State’; Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus, esp. 185–208; Magnus Ryan, ‘Bartolus of Sassoferrato and Free Cities’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 10 (2000): 65–89; Canning, ‘Kantorowicz’s Interpretation’; Dan Edelstein, ‘Rousseau, Bodin, and the Medieval Corporatist Origins of Popular Sovereignty’, Political Theory 47, no. 1 (2021): esp. 10–2. For a historical survey, see: Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought Volume 1 (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), 3–12.
24 Canning, ‘The Corporation’, 11–2.
25 Margo Todd, ‘Anti-Calvinists and the Republican Threat in Early Stuart Cambridge’, Puritanism and its discontents, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Newark, DE: UDP, 2003), 98.
26 Anne McLaren, ‘Rethinking Republicanism: Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos In Context’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 24. cf. George Garnett, ‘Law in the “Vindiciae, contra tyrannos”: A Vindication’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 3 (2006): 877–91.
27 Vindiciae, 16.
28 Ibid., 71.
29 Ibid., 90.
30 Ibid, 21.
31 Ibid., 140.
32 Ibid., 38. The point is also made on 52 where the author observes that ‘the whole of Israel, like a single person, promised the same at God’s stipulation.’
33 Ibid., 45–6. On Baldus and the corporate populus, see: Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus, 185–92.
34 Ibid., 59–60. Compare with D.3.4.7.1 in Digest Vol. 1, 97: ‘A debt to a corporate body is not a debt to individuals and a debt of a corporate body is not a debt of individuals.’
35 Ibid., 69.
36 Ibid., 72.
37 Ibid., 172. See also 78. On the debate between Azo and Lothair, see: Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 36–9. The argument advanced by Azo also became prominent during the conciliarist debates in the fifteenth century when defendants of conciliarism argued against papal supremacy by engaging with a corporatist view of the Church. See: Antony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy (Cambridge: CUP, 1970).
38 Vindiciae, 140, 88.
39 The need to act through a representative was one of the essential features of the corporation intimated by the Digest. See D.3.4.1.1 and D.3.4.2 in: Digest Vol. 1, 96–7. These passages lent credence to a reading of the corporation as fundamentally a persona repraesentata; an idea employed by medieval jurists to highlight the distinct character of the corporation. See: Walter Ullman, ‘The Delictal Responsibility of Medieval Corporations’, Law Quarterly Review 64, no. 1 (1948): 86–7; Maximilian Koessler, ‘The Person in Imagination or Persona Ficta of the Corporation’, Louisiana Law Review 9, no. 4 (1949): 435–49; Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 306; Canning, ‘The Corporation’, 17; Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 29–32.
40 Vindiciae, 40.
41 Ibid., 38 esp. n15.
42 For a general account, see: Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 190–221.
43 Hobbes MS E. 1. A: Untitled. [Bound MS volume, 143pp.; Old Catalogue on spine. Catalogue of the Hardwick Library. Chatsworth, Derbyshire].
44 Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2016), 113.
45 Henry Parker, Observations Upon Some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses (London, 1642), 1.
46 Parker, Observations Upon Some of his Majesties, 45.
47 Ibid., 2.
48 For a summary of these arguments, see: Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 190–221.
49 A.W. McIntosh, ‘The Death Warrant of King Charles I: “The Mystery of the Death Warrant of Charles I: Some Further Historic Doubts”’, House of Lords Record Office Memorandum No. 66.
50 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1141.
51 Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore Politico. Or the Elements of Law, Moral & Politick (London: 1652), 157.
52 Hobbes, De Corpore Politico, 74.
53 Thomas Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London: 1651), 80.
54 Hobbes, Leviathan, 348.
55 Ibid., 260.
56 Ibid., 244.
57 For a cogent summary of Hobbes’s theory of persons and attributed actions, see: Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: CUP, 2007); Marko Simendic, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Person as Persona and “Intelligible Substance”’, Intellectual History Review (2012): 147–62; Philip Pettit, Made With Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2008), 55–69; Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 211–9.
58 Vindiciae, 38.
59 Hobbes, Leviathan, 158.
60 Ibid., 368.
61 Ibid., 286.
62 It is here that Rousseau’s narrative of a single covenant departs from Hobbes in that the Genevan unyieldingly insists on the self-representation of the people through a system of direct democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 57: ‘the sovereign, which is nothing but a collective being, can only be represented by itself … ’
63 Hobbes, Leviathan, 248, 264.
64 Ibid., 248, 260.
65 Ibid., 266.
66 Ibid., 248.
67 Ibid., 264.
68 Ibid., 268.
69 Ibid., 280.
70 Vindiciae, 39.
71 Hobbes, Leviathan, 266. On the personation of God and the theological aspect of Hobbes’s theory of representation, see: Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology’; Bryan Garsten, ‘Religion and Representation in Hobbes’, Leviathan, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT: YUP, 2010); Glen Newey, ‘A Profile In Cowardice? Hobbes, Personation, and the Trinity’, Hobbes on Politics and Religion, ed. Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass (Oxford: OUP, 2018); Eric Nelson, ‘Representation and the Fall’, Modern Intellectual History 17, no. 3 (2020): 647–76.
72 Such an interpretation would certainly explain Hobbes’s ‘powerful impulse’ to write Leviathan as described in Noel Malcolm’s hypothetical timeline of the treatise’s composition. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Editorial Introduction, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 9.
73 Hobbes, Leviathan, 288.
74 In 1666, the House of Commons passed a bill empowering a parliamentary committee to ‘receive Information touching such Books as tend to Atheism, Blasphemy, or Profaneness, or against the Essence or Attributes of God; and in particular … the Book of Mr. Hobbs, called The Leviathan.’ ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 8: 17 October 1666’, Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 8, 1660–1667 (London: HMSO, 1802), 636. These accusations were based on the controversial theological doctrines littered throughout Leviathan, notably the denial of the incorporeality of the soul and the aforementioned redescription of the Holy Trinity found in Chapter 42. Hobbes prudently distanced himself from these earlier statements by exorcising many of the unsettling claims from the Latin edition of 1668, notably the inclusion of Moses in the Trinity (a mistake he admitted to in the Appendix). Hobbes, Leviathan: Editorial Introduction, 179. On the reception of Leviathan, see: Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), esp. 239–42 on the committee.