Hobbes on Political Representation

Abstract

To write about Hobbes's theory of representative government is inescapably a polemical task, so it may be best to start by identifying the principal targets at which my analysis is aimed. Hanna Pitkin in her classic work, The Concept of Representation , argues that Hobbes provides us with ‘the first extended and systematic discussion of representation in English’. It is in Hobbes's Leviathan , she has since claimed, that we encounter ‘the first examination of the idea of representation in political theory’. Lucien Jaume in his more recent book on representative government speaks in similar terms. He too begins with Leviathan , and he too sees Hobbes as ‘the first philosopher to define a concept of representation’ and place it at the heart of a theory of government. These judgments seem to me to offer a doubly misleading impression of Hobbes's achievement. They overlook the fact that, by the time Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, a number of English political writers had already developed a fully fledged theory of representative government. Furthermore, they had put their theory to revolutionary use in the course of the 1640s to challenge the government of Charles I and eventually to legitimise the conversion of England into a republic or ‘free state’ in 1649. My other criticism is that the judgments I have quoted give a distorted view of Hobbes's own project in Leviathan . Far from enunciating a theory of political representation for the first time, what Hobbes is doing in Leviathan is presenting a critical commentary on a range of existing theories, especially those put forward by the parliamentarian opponents of the Stuart monarchy at the beginning of the English civil wars. This contention brings me to my other main target, Philippe Crignon's study of Hobbes entitled De l'incarnation a la representation . According to Crignon, any attempt to relate Hobbes's analysis to the ideological debates of the English revolution is doomed to yield ‘a completely misleading as well as insufficient’ genealogy of his theory of representative government. It is Crignon's thesis that Hobbes's way of understanding the concept of representation announced ‘an historical rupture’ so complete that he stands apart from all these arguments. Hobbes's achievement was to produce ‘a total refoundation of the concept’, separating him off from everything that went before.