The Embodied Politics of Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

Sophocles suggests that the moral vitality of the king sustains the physical vitality of his realm. His apologue elegantly articulates a poetic view of the fundamental relationship between the body of the basileus (Greek for “king” and which derives from “basis”) and the bodies of the citizenry, but the foundational question — What are the properties and processes by which individual bodies construct the civil body, and what consequent relationship obtains among them? — commonly receives little philosophical scrutiny. An enquiry into the influences of body as body in the formation of civil society is dismissed out of hand, and instead philosophical enquiry often accepts that some one or several mental faculties underlie the formation of political community. In epistemology, the liberation of mind from body is translated into the elevation of rationality, while in politics the translation becomes that of reason charged with guiding the will to rule over the body. The early moderns in particular concentrated their efforts on amputating body from mind; most notably, Descartes used the scientific method in the service of epistemology to yield idealism, while Thomas Hobbes is credited with introducing science to politics in treating human beings as part of his atomistic, materialist ontology. The standard interpretation of Hobbes’s political philosophy views individuals as ceaselessly desirous atomistic units who are “trusted politically and existentially only in that minimal level of human rationality requisite to avoid collective suicide,” and consequently as citizens they are to be limited by strict obedience to civil authority, even to the point of despotic rule.3 In advocating “radical individualism,” so this reading asserts, Hobbes insists we take literally the frontispiece to Leviathan, wherein citizens are depicted as atomic units, as nothing more than the accumulated matter of the sovereign body.