Hobbes and the Perpetual Person of the State

Abstract

This article offers an alternative description of the personality of the Hobbesian state by arguing that Leviathan is primarily a perpetual person based on Hobbes’s use of a corporate metaphor for its construction. It undertakes a genealogical examination of the role that perpetuity has played in the theory of corporations since the Middle Ages in several contexts, and concludes by considering the impact that the established tradition of thinking about the corporation as a perpetual entity had on Hobbes and his state, contending that Leviathan should be understood primarily as a persona perpetua tasked with providing a system of perpetual protection.