'Leviathan Inc.: Hobbes on the nature and person of the state' by Johan Olsthoorn in (2020)
History of European Ideas comments
This article aspires to make two original contributions to the vast literature on Hobbes’s account of the nature and person of the commonwealth: (1) I provide the first systematic analysis of his changing conception of ‘person’; and (2) use it to show that those who claim that the Hobbesian commonwealth is created by personation by fiction misconstrue his theory of the state. Whereas Elements/De Cive advance a metaphysics-based distinction between individuals (‘natural persons’) and corporations (‘civil persons’), from Leviathan onwards Hobbes contrasts individuals acting in their own name (‘natural persons’) with representatives (‘artificial persons’). These changes notwithstanding, Hobbes retains the same corporate conception of the state throughout. On the prevailing ‘fictionalist’ interpretation, the sovereign brings the commonwealth into existence by representing it. I argue, rather, that as an incorporation of natural persons, the commonwealth becomes one person through the authorized (i.e. non-fictitious) representation of each constituent member singly by one common representative (‘the sovereign’).
Olsthoorn states
The question of what kind of person the Hobbesian state is has long troubled commentators. The majority position now seems to be that the commonwealth is a ‘person by fiction’ or a ‘purely fictional Person’. According to Hobbes, some subject S is personated by fiction by a representative R whenever S has not authorized R to speak or act in S’s name. Absent such authorization, R’s words and actions are attributed to S not truly, but ‘by Fiction’ (L 16.1). Inanimate things, such as hospitals and bridges, ‘cannot be Authors, nor therefore give Authority to their Actors’ (L 16.9). For this reason, inanimate things can only be personated by fiction. On the prevailing ‘fictionalist’ interpretation, the commonwealth (i.e. the people understood as a single collective body) is likewise personated by the sovereign by fiction. The commonwealth itself cannot possibly have authorized the sovereign to represent it because, Hobbes insists, the people incorporated cannot speak or act except via their representative. Representation by the sovereign is a precondition of the commonwealth’s capacity to act; authorization being an action, this precludes authorized (i.e. non-fictitious) representation.
This article will not challenge these claims: properly understood, they are tenable. Rather, I will counter a further claim defended by proponents of the fictionalist interpretation: that the commonwealth comes into existence by being represented by the sovereign. It is commonly maintained that the commonwealth is a person by fiction since it exists as a person only insofar as it is personated by the sovereign – notwithstanding Hobbes’s claim that representation by fiction is impossible outside the state. Some have inferred from this that the commonwealth itself has a fictional character. My contention is that the fictionalist interpretation misconstrues Hobbes’s theory of the state. It fails to appreciate that personation occurs at two levels: the sovereign represents each individual citizen, thus turning the multitude into one person (‘a commonwealth’), and he bears the person of the commonwealth thus formed. These two instances of personation, I argue, are different in kind, and only the second relation of representation can be said to be fictional. The corporate unity formed by individual authorization of a common representative is one person in virtue of its capacity to speak and act as one – as all its constituent members have bound themselves to accept as theirs whatever their common representative shall do. The fictionalist interpretation wrongly treats the commonwealth as existing apart from the multitude of individuals who compose it. Unlike personations of non-corporate entities like bridges, hospitals, children, and false idols, the person of the commonwealth is not brought into being by representation by fiction.
I bolster my novel interpretation through a second original contribution to the literature. This article provides the first systematic analysis of the dramatic changes in Hobbes’s account and typology of ‘person’, and hence of state personality, between the early works and Leviathan. Hobbes never wavers from regarding ‘persons’ foremost as agents – entities that can be said to speak and act. But his views on what kinds of persons exist, and in what sense they are agents, alter fundamentally between De Cive (1642/1647) and Leviathan (1651). From Leviathan onwards, Hobbes advances what we may call a Ciceronian conception of agent-persons, linked to his new theory of personation by representation. ‘A Person’, Hobbes declares in allusion to Cicero, ‘is the same that an Actor is’ wearing a persona or mask (L 16.3). A person is thus someone who ‘acteth any thing in his own or another’s name, or by his own or another’s authority’ (EW 4: 310). Whoever acts in his own name is called a ‘natural’ person; whoever acts in the name of someone or something else is an ‘artificial’ or ‘representative’ person. The Ciceronian conception thus differentiates persons by whether they bear their own persona or someone else’s, not by their metaphysical status.
An irreducibly different account of personhood is found in Elements (1640) and De Cive. Those texts portray a person as anyone or anything with independent legal standing – any entity to whom words and actions can be ascribed in law. Call this the Juristic conception of agent-persons. Hobbes distinguishes between two kinds of juristic persons: natural and civil ones. On the Juristic conception, ‘natural persons’ are rational agents capable of unmediated action. ‘Civil persons’ are incorporations of natural persons. Thus, Elements explores ‘how a multitude of persons natural are united by covenants into one person civil, or body politic’ (EL 20.1). As social constructs, civil persons are not capable of unmediated action. Some established and binding rule is necessary to determine which actions performed by which natural persons should be regarded as those of the civil person. The Juristic conception thus differentiates persons by their metaphysical status: whether their capacity for agency depends on some artifice or not. Observe that ‘natural person’ means something else on the Juristic conception than on the Ciceronian one. A Juristic natural person is any rational agent ‘naturally’ capable of acting; a Ciceronian natural person is anyone acting in their own name. The two can come apart. I shall therefore henceforth add subscripts: J (Juristic) and C (Ciceronian).
My pioneering analysis of Hobbes’s changing conception of person sheds new light on the controverted question of what gives the commonwealth personality. In the early texts, a plurality of natural- J persons become one civil person by each submitting their will to another natural- J or civil person (‘the sovereign’). Incorporation requires formation of a single will, achieved by each constituent member promising simple obedience to the sovereign. In Leviathan, a multitude becomes one person through individual authorization of a common representative (‘the sovereign’) to carry their persons jointly. Authorized representation replaces promises of simple obedience as the means to ‘reduce all their Wills … unto one Will’ (L 17.13). Leviathan’s novel doctrine of personation by representation is in many ways an improvement: it offers a parsimonious and capacious explanation of how a multitude becomes one person and clarifies the relation between the sovereign and the commonwealth. Yet it also obscures the corporate nature of the Hobbesian commonwealth and conceals that personation occurs at two levels. It does not help that the English Leviathan incoherently states that the sovereign bears only one person – that of the commonwealth; a glitch corrected in the 1668 Latin Leviathan. To grasp Hobbes’s theory of the state, I conclude, we best turn to texts other than the English Leviathan.
