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ABSTRACT
In recent years, the role of fiction in Hobbes’s system of philosophy has come under growing pressure. This is most clearly reflected in various attempts to dismiss the characterization of Hobbes’s state as a person by fiction or even as a person at all. This paper argues against this trend by demonstrating that Hobbes employs fiction in a more consistent and more fundamental way than has been previously recognized. In particular, the paper argues that Hobbes uses fiction to refer to both a peculiar set of mental operations and the ‘things’ they originate, and that he attributes fiction, as process and as product of that process, key cognitive and world-making functions. Chief amongst the latter, the article argues, is the enactment of the people as a representational fiction. This requires the creation of an intersubjectively shared imaginary encouraging individuals to think themselves and act from their position as citizens, identifying with a collective whose unified will the state – and it only – expresses and enacts.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Quentin Skinner and all the participants in the 2018 Annual Symposium in the Humanities and Social Sciences on Skinner’s book, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018), for providing me with a reason to think through the role of fiction in Hobbes’s thought and for their helpful comments. Special thanks are owed to the speakers, David Colclough, Susanna Berger, and Sophie Smith, as well as to Maksymillian del Mare, whose knowledge of legal fictions has been an invaluable source of material.
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 For a positive assessment of the role of fiction see Douglass, ‘The body politic’. See also Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation. For the claim that Hobbes’s Elementa philosophiae seeks to give credibility to the project of a systematic approach to philosophy through a fiction concealing a real disconnection between parts (natural and legal) and the uses of fiction therein, see L. Foisneau, ‘Elements of fiction in Hobbes’s system,’ 122–44.
2 This was the focus of an earlier exchange between Quentin Skinner and David Runciman: Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,’; ‘What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State’. Skinner has come to endorse Runciman’s view that Hobbes’s state is a person by fiction, and this is also the view he adopts in his most recent book, From Humanism to Hobbes, especially in the chapters on political representation and the concept of the state, chs. 9 and 12, respectively. This paper supports this interpretative position, by exploring the full import of the prepositional phrase “by fiction” as referring to special mental operations or ways in which something might be done. For the growing skepticism as to whether Hobbes’s state is a person by fiction or even a person at all, see, amongst others, Sagar, ‘What is the Leviathan?’. This skepticism permeates the assessment of the legacy of Hobbes’s theory of the state in Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, especially p. 105 and p. 137.
3 This separation is central to the argument of Luc Foisneau’s ‘Elements of fiction in Hobbes’s system’.
4 This work started in Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation, but is now being expanded. For na excellent recent defence of the role of fiction – namely the fiction of constituent power – in Hobbes, which shares some common features with the argument presented here, see Lindsay, ‘Pretenders of a Vile and Unmanly Disposition.
5 The distinction between reproductive and productive types of imagination is proposed by Kant in Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 60–62.
6 See Hobbes, Leviathan, I.2, 16. For a discussion of representation-as see Goodman, Languages of Art, especially 28–31.
7 See Foisneau, ‘Elements of fiction in Hobbes’s system,’122–44.
8 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, I.ii.10, 7.
9 Ibid., I.iii.4, 10.
10 Hobbes, Leviathan, I.17, 22.
11 Ibid.
12 On this, see Hoekstra, ‘Disarming the Prophets.
13 Abizadeh, ‘The Representation of Hobbesian Sovereignty’.
14 Hobbes, Leviathan, II.17,120.
15 See Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation, 176.
16 A similar point is made in Newey, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hobbes and Leviathan, 121–3 and Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Schmitt’, at 165 n.55.
17 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, I.xiii.7, 68.
18 It should be noted that Foisneau refers to compound imagination in the ‘Elements of fiction in Hobbes’s system’, but only as a footnote, page 78, n. 25. He does not analyze the forms of imagining it makes possible and how they may lie behind the construction of the political world.
19 Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 15.
20 See Pierre Fontanier’s 1821 definition of prosopopoeia impressively summing up Quintilian’s (Institutio oratoria, 9.2.31), in Fontanier, Les Figures du Discours, 404 ff.
21 Riffaterre, ‘Prosopopeia,’ 108.
22 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.2.31.
23 Riffaterre, ‘Prosopopeia’, 110.
24 Most notably in The Elements of Law II.viii.7, 173–4, where the analogy with the state is famously drawn. The treatment of the state as a person is equally clear from De Cive (1642), where Hobbes maintains that the state ‘is to be taken as one person; and is to be distinguished and differentiated by a unique name from all particular men, having its own rights and its own property.’ Hobbes, De Cive, v.9, 73.
25 Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis, 186.
26 Ockham, A Translation of William of Ockham’s Work, I, 428.
27 Bartolus, Commentary on D. 48.19.16.10.
28 On the reality of legal fictions, see Lind, ‘The Pragmatic Value of Legal Fiction’, 83–109, at 87.
29 See Scarry, ‘The Made-Up and the Made-Real’.
30 Hobbes, Elements, II.viii.7, 174.
31 Ibid., I.xii.8, 63.
32 Ibid., II.ii.4, 120.
33 Ibid.
34 Hobbes, Leviathan, II.29, 230.
35 See Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Political Representation,’ 158, citing Parker, Observations, 18, and the anonymous Maximes Unfolded (1643), 26.
36 See, e.g. Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 200.
37 Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth, 24 and 26.
38 For a thorough discussion of these, see Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in Hobbes, especially chs. 1 and 4.
39 Hobbes, Leviathan, III.44, 423.
40 Hobbes, Leviathan, I.16, 112.
41 Parker, Observations upon Some of His Majesties, 28 and 4.
42 See Hobbes, Leviathan, II.19, 130.
43 Downes, Hobbes, Sovereignty, 58.
44 Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth, 223.
45 A similar point is made in Holland, The Moral Person, 11.
46 Hobbes, Leviathan, II. 31, 250.
47 Hobbes, Leviathan, I.10, 62.
48 See further Sophie Smith's argument about fiction's fundamental role in Hobbes's political philosophy in ‘The Nature of Politics’ Quentin Skinner Lecture, Cambridge University June 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9iG-093aY&feature=youtu.be and Sophie Smith, ‘Hobbes's Spooky State’ (forthcoming).
49 My formulation is indebted to E. Beerbohm’s in In Our Name.
50 Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, 73.
51 Ibid., 72.
52 Ferguson, Sharing Democracy, 73–4.
53 Ibid., 74.
54 See Lindsay, ‘“Pretenders of a Vile and Unmanly Disposition”’, 489.
55 Hobbes, Leviathan, I.16, 112.
56 See Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 465; see also Lindsay’s ‘“Pretenders of a Vile and Humanly Disposition”’.
57 Hobbes, Leviathan, II.30, 245.
58 Cavarero, Stately Bodies, 176.
59 ‘ … in the proper signification of Persons; which is, that which is Represented by another.’ Hobbes, Leviathan, III.42, 339.
60 Hobbes, Elementorum philosophiae sectio secunda de homine, 15.1., 84: “Persona est cui Verba & Actiones hominum attribuuntur vel suae vel alienae. Si suae, Persona naturalis est; si alienae, Fictitia est.”
61 Cavarero, Stately Bodies, 176.
62 Hobbes, Leviathan, II.29, 230; Cavarero, Stately Bodies, 176.
63 This much is argued by, e.g. Phillip Pettit, when he claims that for Hobbes ‘there are no persons but spokespersons’. Pettit, Made with Words, 56.
64 See Hobbes, Leviathan, Epistle Dedicatory, 3.
65 See Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation, 235–53.
66 Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation, especially 147–207; Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth, 220.
67 See Runciman, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of Representation’, 15–34.
68 Hobbes, Leviathan, II.19, 129.
69 Downes, Hobbes, Sovereignty, 60.
70 As is the case in Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 105.
71 Hobbes, Leviathan, II.22, 160.
72 See Olson, Imagined Sovereignties, 20. The difference between need and preference must be noted however, since self-preservation is a necessity about which there is little choice. See also Brito Vieira, ‘Performative Imaginaries, ’ 25–49.
73 Hobbes, Leviathan, II.22, 160.
74 For the illusion thesis, see Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Schmitt’, 165.
75 Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 33.
76 Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Schmitt’, 166.