“Pretenders of a Vile and Unmanly Disposition”: Thomas Hobbes on the Fiction of Constituent Power

Adam Lindsay

doi:10.1177/0090591718805979

Abstract

The prevailing interpretation of constituent power is taken to be the extra-institutional capacity of a group, typically “the people,” to establish or revise the basic constitutional conditions of a state. Among many contemporary democratic theorists, this is understood as a collective capacity for innovation. This paper excavates an alternative perspective from constituent power’s genealogy. I argue that constituent power is not a creative material power, but is a type of political claim that shapes the collective rights, responsibilities, and identity of “the people.” I do so by recovering Thomas Hobbes’s intervention into debates over constituent power among Scottish Presbyterians during the English Civil War. Though a materialist, Hobbes appreciated the centrality of the imagination to politics, and he argued that constituent power was one such phantasm of the mind. In Leviathan, he showed constituent power not to be a material power, but a world-making fiction that furnished political realities with ornamentation of the imagination, which might provide the beliefs and justifications to serve any number of political ends. More generally, the retrieval of a Hobbesian constituent power provides an important challenge to contemporary theories by demonstrating how partisan constructions of constituent power shape the political options available to groups.

Highlights

Hobbes’s social contract appears to make foundational to the commonwealth by institution a body politic that is democratic in origin, there is some agreement that constituent power eludes the Hobbesian version of contractualism.[6]
Frank is very much aware of how the imagination produces the requisite symbolism through which a crowd understand understands itself as one, he combines this with a foundational assumption that pins constituent power to a particular collective agent
Against the prevailing view that constituent power is the extraordinary concrete capacity of a collective to found a constitution, I have sought to show that it is a genre of political claim-making

Summary

ON THE CONCEPTUAL HISTORY OF CONSTITUENT POWER

Thomas Hobbes is rarely read as a theorist of constituent power. Hobbes’s social contract appears to make foundational to the commonwealth by institution a body politic that is democratic in origin, there is some agreement that constituent power eludes the Hobbesian version of contractualism.[6]. These compound images, or ‘fancies’ produced an affective ‘vibration’ within the observer’s body ‘in sympathy with the fancy,’ producing an emotive response that could strike fear or foster excitement in an individual.[35] In its most insidious form, scholastic philosophy furnished a religious worldview in which it was possible to presume the persistence of the soul after death, and, with it, instil fear into citizens to obey the church over the state These details are important because they demonstrate that Hobbes’s account of sense perception was not a technical exercise but was developed as part of a precise political engagement with the partisans of the civil war, and his materialist account of the imagination was a weapon he honed to fight that battle. Them as nothing more than myth-making exercises on the part of the Catholic and Presbyterian clergy

ON THE SEDITIOUS FICTION OF CONSTITUENT POWER

CONSTITUENT POWER AND THE IMAGINATION

CONCLUSION