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The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”: Hobbes on Imagination and Fiction

This is a pre-proof version of the article and is not for citation. The published version is

available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18750257-02702005

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby

contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of

Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the

imaginations of his readers. I elucidate the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s

account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political

philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved

effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of

spiritual darkness. I thus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused

upon his attempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men.

The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body

politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to

transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I

conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract

theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best

understood as imaginary.

Keywords

Thomas Hobbes, imagination, fiction, social contract, eschatology

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18750257-02702005

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby

contrasting it with a natural body.1 In this essay I argue that a central purpose of

Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the

imaginations of his readers. Hobbes first set forth his ideas of fiction and imagination

in the earliest enumeration of his political theory: The Elements of Law. The account

developed there is largely in accord with the corresponding discussion in the opening

chapters of Leviathan, and it is the later work that proved to be Hobbes’s most

comprehensive attempt to shape the imaginations of his seventeenth-century audience.

Hobbes thought that the disturbances and disorders that ravaged England in

the middle of the seventeenth century were predominantly due to men having

mistaken ideas of important concepts. Seditious doctrines flourished as men failed to

understand the proper signification of words like sovereignty and the people, with

erroneous definitions being utilised to promote civil discord.2 Hobbes’s philosophy

started from definitions and throughout he stressed the importance of getting these

right, not only so that civil philosophy could be demonstrated scientifically, much like

geometry, but equally because it was necessary for men to have the right definitions

of words for peace to prevail.

For Hobbes, as many scholars have recognised, language and words were of

1I presented an early draft of this essay to the Hobbes workshop at the 2011 MANCEPT Workshops in

Political Theory. I would like to thank all the participants for their insightful comments, and for written

feedback on earlier drafts I am especially grateful to Laurens van Apeldoorn, Adrian Blau, Timothy

Fowler and the anonymous referees for Hobbes Studies.

T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Part I, Human Nature, Part II, De Corpore

Politico; with Three Lives, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), XXI.4.

2 Hobbes long maintained this view; for example compare Elements, XXI.11, XXVII.13, with

Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. F. Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1889),

especially 68–69.

2

great consequence.3 Yet the full significance of words cannot be appreciated without

attending to the prominence of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature,

which has received far less scholarly attention.4 Much of the power of words lay in

their ability to cast images that would deeply affect and even transform the

imaginations of their audience. That Hobbes was well aware of the power of images is

clear from the visual importance he accorded to the frontispieces that adorn many of

his works.5 Less recognised, however, is the role that Hobbes deemed political and

3 Most comprehensively see P. Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a reading of Hobbes as a precursor of the

linguistic turn, see T. Ball, Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of

Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83–106. The recognition of the importance

of language in Hobbes owes much to the scholarship concerning his use of rhetoric. See principally D.

Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); C. Condren, “On the Rhetorical Foundations of

Leviathan,” History of Political Thought, 11 (1990), 703–720; R. Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy

in Hobbes’s Leviathan (New York: Garland, 1991); Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy

of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); B. Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense

of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 25–54.

4 By far the most comprehensive study is J. Lemetti, Imagination and Diversity in The Philosophy of

Hobbes (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2006). Relatedly see C. Leijenhorst, “Sense and

Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination,” in P.

Springborg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007), 82–108; T. Butler, Imagination and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 139–179; L. Foisneau, “Elements of Fiction in Hobbes’s System of

Philosophy,” in R. Scholar and A. Tadié (eds.), Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe,

1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 71–86. While not principally addressing the role of imagination,

my thoughts on the topic are greatly indebted to T. Stanton, “Hobbes and Schmitt,” History of

European Ideas, 37 (2011), 160–167.

5 Typical here is Horst Bredekamp’s discussion of the force of images in Leviathan, which focuses on

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religious argument to have on shaping the imaginations of men. By bringing his ideas

on the imagination and fiction to the fore, I show both that Hobbes’s political

philosophy depended upon men coming to understand their relationship with the

commonwealth in a certain way, and that Leviathan was itself designed to bring about

the very transformation in their imaginations required to make this understanding

possible.

I proceed by elucidating the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of

human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to

transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas

that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. I thus

advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon his attempt to

dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved

replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of

the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that

men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by

adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and

showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as

imaginary.

Imagination and Fiction

In both the Elements and Leviathan Hobbes’s political philosophy proceeds from an

the importance of the frontispiece without considering the wider significance of imagination for

Hobbes’s philosophy; see his “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to

Leviathan, 29–60. I do not discuss the frontispieces in this essay, but my interpretation complements

their much recognised significance.

4

account of human nature, or of man, and it is in the former of these works that his

ideas concerning imagination and fiction are presented most clearly. The opening

chapters of the Elements are concerned with the powers of the mind that may be

called cognitive or imaginative, for the understanding of which

we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually

certain images of conceptions of the things without us, insomuch that if a man

could be alive, and all the rest of the world annihilated, he should nevertheless

retain the image thereof, and of all those things which he had before seen and

perceived in it; every man by his own experience knowing that the absence or

destruction of things once imagined, doth not cause the absence or destruction of

the imagination itself. This imagery and representations of the qualities of things

without us is that which we call our cognition, imagination, ideas, notice,

conception, or knowledge of them.6

In short, even if the whole world around us was destroyed we would still have our

imaginations, since our cognition, ideas and knowledge of the world are all based on

the images we have of things. Although Hobbes continued to analyse the different

senses that we possess, it is striking that this passage, as with much of the second

chapter on sense, is so exclusively focused on images and sight. The images we have

of things are simply apparitions of the mind caused by motion, so colour is not

inherent in the object viewed but an effect upon the observer. Hobbes thus concluded,

in opposition to the prevalent Aristotelian view, “that whatsoever accidents or

qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are

seemings and apparitions only.”7 At this point he turned to examine the imagination.

6 Hobbes, Elements, I.8.

7 Ibid., II.10. On the political importance of combatting Aristotelian theories of sense and imagination

5

Hobbes defined imagination as “conception remaining, and by little and little

decaying from and after the act of sense”,8 or more succinctly in Leviathan as

“nothing but decaying sense”.9 The remainder of the chapter is predominantly

concerned with the question of dreams and how they can be distinguished from

original sense. In dreams the imagination restores or recalls sense to the mind with

such clarity that the mind can take notice of nothing but the present. It is primarily

this that distinguishes dreams from waking sense and we should be unsurprised to

find that men are often deceived by taking their past dreams for truth or visions.10

Within the discussion of dreams, Hobbes defined a “FICTION of the mind” as where

the mind “composeth an imagination of divers conceptions that appeared singly to the

sense.” Hobbes provided the example of a gold mountain, which is composed by the

imagination from the independent senses of a mountain and the colour gold. Similar

fictions that appear to us are “castles in the air, chimeras, and other monsters which

are not in rerum natura.”11

A fiction is a composition of things once sensed that is created by the

imagination and which does not correspond to the nature of things, that is, to any

natural body or object. In visual terms, this composition is one of images. In the

following chapter Hobbes considered the succession of conceptions in the mind,

which takes place in the imagination, and allows us to have ideas of the future. From

see Leijenhorst, “Sense and Nonsense about Sense,” 98–102.

8 Hobbes, Elements, III.1.

9 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, vols. 2 and 3: The English and Latin Texts, ed. N. Malcolm (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 2012), 2.

10 Hobbes, Elements, III.8–10; Leviathan, 30–34. In Leviathan Hobbes placed greater emphasis on

realising the absurdity of dreams while awake, but not the absurdity of waking thoughts while asleep.

11 Hobbes, Elements, III.4; Leviathan, 30.

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“our conceptions past, we make a future”,12 which is a form of presumption, or as he

put it in the equivalent section of Leviathan: “the Future [is] but a fiction of the

mind”.13 For Hobbes, then, the future is something we visualise based on our

imaginations and is determined by the images we hold of the present and past.

The role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature is often

understated.14 Greater attention is usually given to the importance of language or

words, which are signs (mutually recognised marks), which enable us to recall to the

mind the conceptions of the thing that is thereby signified. Names and definitions are

types of signs, the use of which distinguishes men from beasts and makes science and

philosophy possible. Words and language are often abused, not least when people use

words that have “no images or conceptions in their minds answering to the words they

speak.”15 Nonetheless, the proper use of language is equally capable of imposing

order and regularity upon men’s disparate imaginations. As the example of dreams

illustrates well, the imaginations of different individuals can vary sharply, making

them particularly difficult to control. The succession of conceptions in the mind

involved in thought is similarly precarious because “in the Imagining of any thing,

there is no certainty what we shall Imagine next.”16 The possibility of effectively

regulating the imaginations of men depends upon the use of settled definitions that

enable everyone to understand a given word in the same way.

Hobbes defined understanding as “nothing else, but conception caused by

12 Hobbes, Elements, IV.7.

13 Hobbes, Leviathan, 42–44.

14 The most notable exception here is Lemetti, Imagination and Diversity, especially 69–80.

15 Hobbes, Elements, V.14. On the uses and abuses of speech see Leviathan, 48–50; and for extended

analysis see Pettit, Made with Words, 42–97.

16 Hobbes, Leviathan, 38.

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Speech”, which is attained when someone, upon hearing certain words, has the

precise thoughts that those words “were ordained and constituted to signifie”.17 In this

respect, understanding is always shared, for it requires men having the same

conceptions in their minds in response to the utterance of certain words. The power of

language thus stems from its capacity to cast images or conceptions upon the

imaginations of men, which could bring otherwise diverse imaginations into accord.

This would only ever be achieved if words are clearly defined; indeed, Hobbes

claimed that one of the properties of a definition is “that it gives an universal notion of

the thing defined, representing a certain universal picture thereof, not to the eye, but

to the mind.”18 Although it is not clear precisely what Hobbes meant by a “universal

picture”, his idea seems to be that a definition can transmit many images to the mind,

since a word may signify a potentially unlimited number of particular objects which

satisfy its definition.19 To this extent language is of greater force than sight. The

reason why Hobbes was so concerned with defining the proper signification of words,

then, is precisely because words conjure up images that go a long way to determining

how we act.20

The imagination is also closely related to man’s passions, which, according to

the account in the Elements, are “the beginning of all his voluntary motions”.21

17 Ibid., 62.

18 T. Hobbes, De corpore, trans. as Elements of Philosophy. The First Section, Concerning Body, in W.

Molesworth (ed.), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (hereafter EW), 10 vols.

(London: Bohn, 1839–1845), vol. I, I.6.15.

19 Ibid., I.2.9.

20 On this point see also T. Stanton, “Hobbes’s Redefinition of the Commonwealth,” in K. Allen and

T. Stoneham (eds.), Causation and Modern Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 2010),

118–119; idem., “Hobbes and Schmitt,” 165.

21 Hobbes, Elements, V.14.

8

Hobbes even described many of the passions in terms of the imagination, so glory (the

first passion he defined) proceeds “from the imagination or conception of our own

power”, and, similarly, he defined pity as “imagination or fiction of future calamity to

ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s present calamity”.22 As our

passions flow from our imaginations, Hobbes’s position in the Elements is quite

consistent with that he later formulated in Leviathan, where he stated that “the

Imagination is the first internall beginning of all Voluntary Motion”. Indeed, it is the

role of the imagination that defines all voluntary motion in contradistinction to vital

motion.23

Given the role the imagination serves in his account of human nature, one

would expect it to be of great consequence in Hobbes’s political philosophy as well.

As will become apparent, a central purpose of his philosophy was to guide or even

transform his audience’s imaginations, much as he intimated when invoking one of

his favourite contrasts, averring that “whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe,

from the barbarity of the American savages; is the workmanship of fancy, but guided

by the precepts of true philosophy.”24 Imagination is necessary for people to

understand the world and their relationship with it. This is due to the crucial role it

plays in human understanding as, in a sense, it is all encompassing and cannot be

distinguished from reasoning or deliberation. This is a point that Hobbes admonished

one of his great adversaries, Bishop Bramhall, for failing to appreciate:

He would have known that consideration, understanding, reason, and all the

passions of the mind, are imaginations. That to consider a thing, is to imagine it;

that to understand a thing, is to imagine it; that to hope and fear, are to imagine

22 Ibid., IX.1, and IX.10, respectively.


24 T. Hobbes, The Answer to Sir William Davenant’s Preface before “Gondibert”, in EW, IV, 450.

9

the things hoped for and feared.25

Hobbes consistently disparaged those who used words that failed to produce mental

images,26 yet he was equally aware of the damage that could be done by words that

conjured up images or conceptions that would excite men to sedition and to mistake

their rightful sovereign. He was, then, at once concerned to constrain the power of the

imagination in controlling political argument, while at the same time relying on the

imagination to make his philosophy effective, creating a problem that might be

viewed as paradoxical.27 Yet the paradox can easily be explained away. For Hobbes, it

was simply a fact of political argument that it deeply influences the imaginations and

therewith the beliefs of its audience. While well aware of the dangers of such

argument, he equally appreciated how imperative it was to expound a philosophy that

would cast the right images upon the imaginations of men; these being the images that

would lead them to peace rather than to sedition and civil war.

For Hobbes, philosophy must start from definitions, and the first property of a

25 T. Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, in EW, V, 358–359; see also

401: “I do indeed conceive that deliberation is an act of imagination or fancy; nay more, that reason

and understanding also are acts of the imagination, that is to say, they are imaginations.” Elsewhere he

claimed that there is no difference between a “thing in the intellect” and “an imaginary thing”. See T.

Hobbes, Thomas White’s ‘De mundo’ examined, trans. H. Whitmoe Jones (London: Bradford

University Press, 1976), IV.1.

26 For instance, after reading Étienne Noël’s Le Plein du vuide, Hobbes complained that “This little

book also contains some expressions which do not produce any mental images of things.” See “Hobbes

to Marin Mersenne, 17 February 1648,” in N. Malcolm (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes,

2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 167.

27 Butler, Imagination and Politics, 142.

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definition is to take away all equivocation.28 This is not only a theoretical necessity,

but also of great practical and political import, which is why the sovereign must give

meaning to words and thereby render them unequivocal.29 Much as he advised the

sovereign, Hobbes himself attempted to formulate unequivocal definitions to conjure

up images that would quell civil discord. As Leviathan is a book of words its purpose

was to evoke conceptions in the imaginations of its audience, for, according to

Hobbes, that is simply what words do. Yet his attempt to impress images upon the

minds of his readers permeates far deeper. Before analysing the way Hobbes sought to

cast the fiction of the body politic upon his audience, I first examine that which he

deemed of equal importance: the evisceration of the false images promulgated by dark

and vain philosophy.

Enlightenment from Spiritual Darkness

As early as the Elements, Hobbes devoted much of his discussion of the imagination

to the topic of dreams and how we are deceived when we mistake them for reality. In

the second chapter of Leviathan, however, the rhetorical force and political

significance of this deception is made far more explicit:

If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques

from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by

which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much

more fitted than they are for civill Obedience.30

28 Hobbes, Concerning Body, I.6.15.

29 T. Hobbes, De cive, trans. as On the Citizen, ed. R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), VI.9.

30 Hobbes, Leviathan, 34; see also Concerning Body, IV.25.9. Similarly, Hobbes later recounted stories

11

The final part of Leviathan is reserved for enlightening men from the kingdom of

darkness disseminated by “a Confederacy of Deceivers”,31 yet, as the passage

illustrates, this theme is anticipated throughout the work. The belief in sprits, ghosts

and prophesies was surprisingly widespread during the middle of the seventeenth

century, with Anglican ministers actively encouraging the proliferation of ghost

stories to confute the materialism, mortalism and (alleged) atheism associated with

Leviathan. The links between beliefs in ghosts and religious faith were emphasised to

support ideas of the immortality of the soul, bodily resurrection, and the authority of

the Holy Trinity.32 Hobbes’s heterodox theology challenged all these ideas (among

many others), which he thought weakened or tended to the dissolution of the

commonwealth. He thus chided those who set up “another Kingdome, as it were a

Kingdome of Fayries, in the dark”, for as soon as the spiritual kingdom is opposed to

the temporal one the danger of civil war is imminent, precisely “because the fear of

Darknesse, and Ghosts, is greater than other fears”.33

Recall that to fear, for Hobbes, is to imagine the thing feared. The kingdom of

darkness is one in which men’s fear leads to the dissemination of seditious opinions

and finally to civil war. In De corpore Hobbes wrote of “how hard a thing it is to

weed out of men’s minds such inveterate opinions as have taken root there, and been

of how the “dreams and prognostications” of false prophets excited sedition during the Long

Parliament, Behemoth, 187–188.


32 S. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century

England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), especially 16–17, 26–28. See also P. Marshall, Mother

Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 217–220.


12

confirmed in them by the authority of most eloquent writers”.34 To do so it was

necessary to transform his audience’s imaginations by effacing the dark images from

the minds of men so that peace could be secured. Although Hobbes was at his most

polemical in attempting this in the fourth part of Leviathan, the foundations of his

critique were laid in the preceding part, concerning the Christian commonwealth.

Much of the third part of Leviathan was aimed at dethroning the false ideas

that men have of certain theological concepts. The central chapters, which are

concerned with the proper signification of words found in Holy Scripture, serve the

purpose of demystification. One of the most pernicious false beliefs propagated by the

schoolmen was that spirits are incorporeal substances. For Hobbes, such speech was

absurd as incorporeal signifies without body and substance signifies body; these

words, therefore, “when they are joined together, destroy one another”. The proper

signification of spirit is either an invisible substance or a “Phantasme of the

Imagination”.35 Hobbes did not deny the existence of spirits, but by reducing them to

either material phenomena or phantasms of the mind—that is, dreams—the evocative

imagery associated with them could be displaced. In such cases to explain was to

explain away the false conceptions that occupied men’s minds.36

The most prominent misconceptions that men held, however, concerned

eschatology. To purge men’s minds of these Hobbes began by arguing that the

kingdom of God is not a metaphorical term and signifies a real and terrestrial

kingdom. It should not be taken to signify eternal felicity or a higher heaven. Instead,

34 Hobbes, Concerning Body, I.1.1.


36 For extended discussion on this point, see K. Schuhmann, “Phantasms and Idols: True Philosophy

and Wrong Religion in Hobbes,” in L. Foisneau and G. Wright (eds.), Nuove prospettive critiche sul

Leviatano di Hobbes (Milan: F. Angeli, 2004), 25–31.

13

“by the Kingdome of God, is properly meant a Common-wealth, instituted (by the

consent of those which were to be subject thereto) for their Civill Government”.37 Not

only is the kingdom of God to be found on Earth, but the imagery Hobbes evoked is

that of a civil commonwealth, which he had spent the first half of Leviathan

developing. Similarly, when Hobbes proceeded to discuss the signification of eternal

life and Hell, he did so in relation to the problem of maintaining civil society:

It is impossible a Common-wealth should stand, where any other than the

Soveraign, hath a power of giving greater rewards than Life; and of inflicting

greater punishments, than Death. Now seeing Eternall life is a greater reward,

than the life present; and Eternall torment a greater punishment than the death of

Nature; It is a thing worthy to be well considered, of all men that desire (by

obeying Authority) to avoid the calamities of Confusion, and Civill war, what is

meant by holy Scripture, by Life Eternall, and Torment Eternall38

Just as eternal life, or Heaven, is real and on Earth, so too the “Enemy, and his

Kingdome must be on Earth also.” Hobbes insisted that the images associated with

eternal torment, such as the lake of fire, should be taken only as metaphorical. There

is no eternal life for the condemned. Instead, everlasting death is simply a second

death.39 The images of eternal suffering and torment that men so fear, leading them to

disobey their sovereign in the name of religion, cannot be supported by an appeal to


38 Ibid., 698. Hobbes later made the point even more succinctly: to the extent that men believe that

“eternal torture is more terrible than death, so much they would fear the clergy more than the King.”

Behemoth, 14–15.

39 Hobbes, Leviathan, 716; a point he reiterated forcefully in the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan,

1160.

14

Scripture; rather they are conceptions conjured up by others to incite sedition. Hobbes

repudiated the image of everlasting suffering in the lake of fire and other heathen

images of Hell and, in so doing, reduced the fear of eternal torment to nothing more

than fear of a second death. Hobbes’s aim was to eradicate the images employed by

religious authorities over men as instruments of fear and power, a purpose which

Bishop Bramhall surmised well when he exclaimed that Hobbes “hath killed the great

infernal Devil, and all his black angels, and left no devils to be feared, but devils

incarnate, that is, wicked men.”40

This theme is continued as Hobbes turned to consider the kingdom of darkness

and the spiritual darkness arising from the misinterpretation of Scripture. The

confusion of mistaking second death for eternal torment is compounded by the view

that all men have an immortal and immaterial soul, whereas the soul rather signifies

the life of a living creature.41 The belief in incorporeal spirits is closely related to the

belief in demons. Hobbes attributed this belief to the Greeks, although the Jews

shared in the opinion “concerning Phantasmes, namely, that they were not

Phantasmes, that is, Idols of the braine, but things reall, and independent on the

Fancy.”42 What is more, the very reason why the ancients confused images of the

fancy for real spirits and idols was because they had failed to discover the true nature

of sight.43 Hobbes, then, considered that it was precisely due to his refutation of the

40 J. Bramhall, cited in T. Hobbes, An Answer to Bishop Bramhall’s Book, called “The Catching of the

Leviathan”, in EW, IV, 356.


42 Ibid., 1016. Hobbes used the language of fiction to make the same point elsewhere: ‘The other sorts

of devils are called in the Scripture dæmonia, which are the feigned Gods of the heathen, and are

neither bodies nor spiritual substances, but mere fancies, and fictions of terrified hearts, feigned by the

Greeks and other heathen people.’ Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 211.


15

scholastic understanding of sense and imagination that he was uniquely able to reveal

demons and false idols to be nothing more than phantasms.

Some commentators have recently argued that Hobbes’s mortalism can be

explained as part of his attempt to apply his materialist metaphysics to religious

interpretation in the second half of Leviathan.44 While it is true that Hobbes reduced

spirits to material phenomena, this fails to capture the full force of what he sought to

achieve. The reason why the notions of incorporeal spirits and eternal suffering

needed to be refuted was because of the images that such words conjured up in the

minds of their audience, which could excite them to rebel against the temporal

sovereign. The rejection of the idea of everlasting suffering in a lake of fire was not

necessitated by his materialist metaphysics, but, instead, by the importance he placed

on displacing such images from the imaginations of men, which greatly influenced

their behaviour. It was not only Hobbes’s materialism that informed his religious

interpretation, then, but rather, much as he indicated, his anti-Aristotelian

understanding of sight and imagination and therewith the great significance that he

accorded to the power of images.

For Hobbes, the authors of “this Darknesse in Religion, are the Romane, and the

Presbyterian Clergy”, who sought to attain “a Soveraign Power over the People” by

disseminating the false belief that the church on Earth is the kingdom of God from the

Old Testament.45 In Leviathan Hobbes’s scorn was most memorably directed at the

Pope and the Roman Clergy, whose doctrines were not derived from Scripture but

44 J. Overhoff, Hobbes’s Theory of the Will: Ideological Reasons and Historical Circumstances

(Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 192–211; E. Brandon, The Coherence of

Hobbes’s Leviathan: Civil and Religious Authority Combined (London: Continuum, 2007), 58–74. But

cf. D. Johnston, “Hobbes’s Mortalism,” History of Political Thought, 10 (1989), 647–663.


16

from heathen philosophy in general and Aristotle in particular. This was further

propagated by the universities and the schoolmen, yet such natural philosophy “was

rather a Dream than Science”.46 Having displaced the imagery evoked by their

philosophy, Hobbes was at his most sardonic, famously claiming that the Papacy

may be compared not unfitly to the Kingdome of Fairies; that is, to the old

wives Fables in England, concerning Ghosts and Spirits, and the feats they play

in the night… as the Fairies have no existence, but in the Fancies of ignorant

people, rising from the Traditions of old Wives, or old Poets: so the Spirituall

Power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own Civill Dominion) consisteth

onely in the Fear that Seduced people stand in, of their Excommunications; upon

hearing of false Miracles, false Traditions, and false Interpretations of

Scripture.47

The final part of Leviathan abounds with imagery. Hobbes’s purpose was to show that

Aristotelian philosophy is but a dream, and to awaken his audience from the ensuing

nightmare of spiritual darkness emanating from Rome. The image cast upon the

minds of readers when they read of the Papacy is no longer one of spiritual authority

but rather the comically ridiculous one of the kingdom of fairies. Although the Roman

church here provided the main object of Hobbes’s ridicule, he maintained that

Presbyterian ministers were at least as culpable for encouraging the sedition that led

to civil war. In the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, he wrote that the cause of the

civil war “was nothing other than the quarrelling, first between the Roman Church

and the Anglican, and then within the Anglican Church between the Episcopalian and

46 Ibid., 1058; see also Behemoth, 41–43.


17

Presbyterian pastors, about theological issues.”48 By the time of Behemoth, his wrath

was chiefly reserved for the Presbyterian ministers, whose seditious doctrine “has

been stuck so far into the people’s heads and memories… that I fear the

commonwealth will never be cured.”49 Hobbes considered both the Roman clergy and

the Presbyterian ministers to be the authors of religious darkness because they

claimed for their churches a power greater than that of the sovereign, whereas peace

could never be secured unless men came to understand that the authority of religion

derives solely from the laws of the commonwealth promulgated by the sovereign.50

Hobbes’s aim, then, was to correct men’s vision, for “Temporall and Spirituall

Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and

mistake their Lawfull Soveraign.”51 The final two parts of Leviathan attempted to

clear away all the false doctrines that might make men mistake their obligation to the

civil sovereign for obligation to a false sovereign in the name of religion. According

to Hobbes, all that is required for salvation is the inward belief that Jesus is the

Christ.52 One purpose of reducing Christianity to this single article of faith was to

allow the sovereign the right to determine the proper forms of public worship,53 which

could serve an important civic role.54 One way of doing this, however, was to develop


49 Hobbes, Behemoth, 57.

50 Ibid., 46.

51 Hobbes, Leviathan, 732–734. As early as 1641 Hobbes had written that the dispute between the

spiritual and civil powers has been the main “cause of ciuill warres, in all places of Christendome”. See

“Hobbes to William Cavendish, 23 July 1641,” in Correspondence, 120.


53 See G.M. Vaughan, Behemoth Teaches Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education (Lanham,

MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 68–69.

54 Hobbes, Leviathan, 176–178, 570–572.

18

a new civil imagery that could take the place of the religious imagery that he hoped to

root out from the minds of men.

Hobbes maintained the incomprehensibility of God and thought that the words

we use to signify His attributes may be only superlatives or negatives; words that

signify our inability to conceive of Him.55 As we can have no images of anything

infinite, “there can bee no Image of God; nor of the Soule of Man; nor of Spirits”.56

The incomprehensibility of God ceases not only to make Him a proper object for

philosophical or scientific inquiry, but equally strips away any images associated with

Him as an object of fear. If to fear is to fear that which is imagined, and we can

attribute to God only negatives or superlatives, then we may come to realise that the

picture we fear is clouded in obscurity, or even empty. Once the images of demons

and eternal torment have been displaced from the minds of men, the space is open for

Hobbes to impress upon them the fiction of the body politic. Hobbes denied that we

can have an image of the immortal God, but in His place, and under His name,

Hobbes sought to conjure up the imagery of the commonwealth, the temporal

kingdom and the mortal God:

This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more

reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortall God, our

peace and defence.57

If Hobbes had been confident of men’s ability to use their natural reason to arrive at

the truths of civil science themselves it may have been sufficient for him to have

cleared away the insidious imagery that so obtruded their judgment. Yet this is only

55 Ibid., 46, 160, 564–566; Concerning Body, IV.26.1; ‘De mundo’ examined, XXVII.1.


57 Ibid., 260.

19

half the story of Leviathan. While effacing the imagery propagated by the schoolmen

and ecclesiastics, Hobbes also sought to ingrain a new imagery: the imagery of the

mortal God and the mighty Leviathan.

The Fiction of the Body Politic

The most significant debate about the role of fiction in Hobbes’s political philosophy

concerns whether or not the sovereign should be said to represent the state by fiction.

It is thus worth considering this question briefly, while keeping in mind that the

discussion has been principally concerned with understanding Hobbes’s notions of

authorisation, representation and persons (and not fiction or imagination). Quentin

Skinner argues that the sovereign is importantly not a fiction but a “purely artificial”

person.58 In reply, David Runciman contends that Hobbes’s state is best understood as

a “person by fiction”, and that what Hobbes meant by a “person by fiction” is actually

what Skinner means by a “purely artificial” person.59 The analysis rests primarily on

the opening lines of Chapter XVI of Leviathan:

A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or

as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to

whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction.

When they are considered as his owne, then he is called a Naturall Person: And

when they are considered as representing the words and actions of an other, then

58 Q. Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” The Journal of Political

Philosophy, 7 (1999), 1–29.

59 D. Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” The Journal of

Political Philosophy, 8 (2000), 268–278.

20

he is a Feigned or Artificiall person.60

Hobbes used the term fiction on one other occasion in the chapter where he claimed

that there are a few things “uncapable of being represented by Fiction.” After listing

some inanimate objects, he clarified that these things are incapable of being

personated only “before there be some state of Civill Government.”61 This, however,

sheds little light on precisely what it means to be represented by fiction. Runciman

attempts to translate the opening passage and infers that among all feigned and

artificial persons there is a distinction between those who represent others truly and

those who do so by fiction.62 Yet it is by no means evident that this is the meaning that

Hobbes intended the passage to convey. The distinction between being represented

truly or by fiction applies to both natural and feigned, or artificial, persons, since a

natural person is represented providing his words are considered as his own, which

could either be truly (considered so because they really are his own) or by fiction

(only considered as his own). This point is especially significant as it opens up the

possibility that the individuals who covenant to generate sovereignty could be natural

persons whose words are considered to be represented by the person of the sovereign.

These persons do not truly covenant, they are just considered to do so by fiction; a

point to which I return in the conclusion.

Somewhat surprisingly, what the exchange is lacking is a clear definition of 60 Hobbes, Leviathan, 244.

61 Ibid., 246.

62 Runciman, “What Kind of Person?” 269–270. The idea that representation by fiction applies to only

artificial and not to natural persons also appears to be accepted by Monica Brito Vieira when she

equates representation by fiction with representation of a non-person; see her The Elements of

Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes’s

Theory of the State (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 153–158.

21

“fiction”. Both Skinner and Runciman also consider the corresponding chapter from

the Latin Leviathan and, perhaps more promisingly, Chapter XV of De homine,

entitled “De homine fictitio”. However, as Skinner’s and Runciman’s analyses are

focused on representation and the person of the state, they have no recourse to

Hobbes’s earlier works, since the theory of authorisation and personation was

introduced only in Leviathan. This provides for an incomplete understanding of

Hobbes’s ideas on fiction, as even if the idea of a person being represented by fiction

is original to Leviathan, the idea that the body politic is itself a fictitious body is

developed in the Elements.63 Indeed, the question of whether or not Hobbes viewed

the sovereign as representing the state by fiction may be analysed independently to

that of whether the body politic itself should be understood as a fictitious body. It is to

the latter question I now turn.

When discussing the nature of different types of commonwealths in the

Elements, Hobbes explicitly claimed that “a body politic, as it is a fictitious body, so

are the faculties and will thereof fictitious also”.64 The term fictitious body is here

used in contradistinction to a natural body. In his later works Hobbes more frequently

drew the distinction between a natural and an artificial body and there is some

similarity between artifice and fiction. Both artificial and fictitious bodies signify

something created by man, yet it is the latter term alone that evokes the idea that the

creation exists only in the imaginations of men. For example, neither a chair nor a

gold mountain is a natural body, but the former is an artificial body, whereas the latter

63 Yet scholars who have considered that the body politic is a fictitious body have tended to focus on

Leviathan; see Lucien Jaume, “La Théorie de la “Personne Fictive” dans le Léviathan de Hobbes,”

Revue française de science politique, 33 (1983). 1009–1035; C.D. Tarlton, “Leviating Leviathan:

Glosses on a Theme in Hobbes,” Ethics, 88 (1977), 8.

64 Hobbes, Elements, XXI.4.

22

is a fictitious body. A fiction is a composition of different images or conceptions that

takes place in the mind. The body politic is not a body that exists in rerum natura.

Instead, the image of a multitude of men is combined with the image of a unified

human body, and it is this that gives the commonwealth its unity and transforms a

multitude into one person. The same is true of the will of the body politic. The

importance, for Hobbes, is that a disparate multitude can be conceived of as a unified

person with a unified will. To claim that the body politic is a fictitious body, then, is to

claim that it exists only in the imaginations of men. The unity of the fictitious person

exists only so long as men imagine it to exist. To recognise this is to appreciate just

how fragile Hobbes considered the unity of the body politic to be, yet, as disquieting

as this conclusion might at first appear, it coheres well with what he sought to achieve

throughout his political philosophy. The reason why the image of the sovereign is so

authoritative is precisely because the reality of political power is so precarious. The

sovereign power is quite literally, and only, “as great, as possibly men can be

imagined to make it.”65

One reason for showing that the body politic is a fictitious body in the

Elements is to pre-empt any suggestion that the use of fiction and imagery in

Leviathan is just introduced to give rhetorical embellishment to Hobbes’s considered

philosophical view. On the contrary, his analysis of the imagination leads to the

conclusion that the body politic is a fictitious body and this is equally true of

Leviathan as it is of the Elements. This being the case, it might be asked why Hobbes

described the body politic as only an artificial and not a fictitious body in the later

recensions of his political theory. One possible answer is that Hobbes’s works were

intended for different audiences and he never authorised the publication of the

Elements. Whereas his earlier works were designed to shape public opinion only 65 Hobbes, Leviathan, 320.

23

through intermediaries, Leviathan was also intended to do so directly.66 It was the

readers of Leviathan whose imaginations needed to be affected. Instead of defining

the body politic as a fictitious body in Leviathan, which would draw attention to its

fragility, Hobbes was more concerned with imprinting the fiction of the body politic

upon the minds of his readers, and so focused on developing the images to ensure that

this could be achieved. Indeed, the very idea that the body politic is only a fictitious

body might prove insidious if appropriated by those who would rather use it to excite

sedition than to move men towards peace.

Hobbes’s attempt to shape the imaginations of his audience permeates

Leviathan. Todd Butler has stressed the effect that his discussion of punishment was

intended to have upon men’s imaginations, which would help to form opinion through

the use of rewards and harms.67 This draws attention to the importance of directing

men’s imaginations towards the proper object of fear, the most prominent example of

which is actually Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature. The state of nature is

portrayed in such a way that men will conceive there to be nothing more miserable

than living without civil laws. As I have already shown, Hobbes displaced the images

of everlasting suffering in Hell from his eschatology, and nowhere, according to

Hobbes, do men suffer more than in the state of nature, the fear of returning to which

should pervade their imaginations the moment they entertain notions of disobedience

or rebellion.68

66 See Johnston, Rhetoric, 89.

67 Butler, Imagination and Politics, 164–165. According to Hobbes, punishment is an example that

frames and necessitates the will towards virtue, Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 177.

68 Cf. Richard Tuck, who argues that a central purpose of Hobbes’s eschatology (and even his whole

philosophy) was to relieve men of fear; see his “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” in N.

Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds.), Political Discourses in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993), 131–132. My account supports Tuck’s interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology,

24

The most imposing image that Hobbes adopted in Leviathan, however, is that

of the sovereign himself, or the mortal God, for it was this that would help men to

understand their relationship with the commonwealth. Where the immortal God is

incomprehensible, Hobbes’s mortal God is accompanied by the most vivid imagery,

as the frontispiece to Leviathan attests. Hobbes averred that “in a larger use of the

word Image, is contained also, any Representation of one thing by another. So an

earthly Soveraign may be called the Image of God”,69 and it was this image that he

was most concerned to impress upon his readers’ minds. For Hobbes, in fact, the

fiction of the body politic is not just a composition of images in the strict sense. He

attached the imagery of the sovereign to the word God, while arguing that we are

unable to conceive of the immortal God. Given that we can have no image of the

immortal God, Hobbes hoped that that men might come to associate the word God

with the image of the sovereign, as a mortal God. In this respect, the images that men

have of the mortal God would be attached to the ideas they associate with the

immortal God. According to Hobbes, the obligation that men have to God follows

from his irresistible power and man’s corresponding weakness, and to question such

power is to commit injustice.70 If the sovereign is imagined to be a mortal God then

men will come to think of him as irresistible and protection will be secured. Strictly

speaking, of course, he is never irresistible, as men always retain their right of self-

preservation. This right, however, entails no corresponding obligation on the part of

the sovereign and, given how fearful men should be of returning to the state of nature

with other men, Hobbes deemed it best not even to conceive of entering into the state

but differs in so far as Hobbes’s aim was to redirect the object of men’s fear to the state of nature, rather

than to relieve them from fear completely.


70 Hobbes, On the Citizen, XV.7; Leviathan, 558; Of Liberty and Necessity, 250.

25

of nature with the sovereign.

Earlier I discussed Hobbes’s presentation of the kingdom of God, but now the

analogy with his mortal God should be all the more apparent. Even though the

obligation men have to God flows from his irresistible power, the Kingdom of God is

a commonwealth instituted by consent, so “God is King of all the Earth by his Power:

but of his chosen people, he is King by Covenant.”71 Hobbes insisted that the kingdom

of God on Earth will not return until the second coming of Christ, but the fiction that

he cast of the mighty Leviathan might appear to be a close approximation. Ironically,

men living under such a mortal God could be deceived into thinking that the kingdom

of God has come; the very opinion that Hobbes thought so seditious when

promulgated by a confederacy of deceivers.72 Yet whereas in rebellious hands the

doctrine may be used to excite sedition, the imagery that Hobbes evoked sought only

to quell discord and move men to obedience.

Conclusion

In this essay I have revealed the importance of imagination and fiction to Hobbes’s

philosophy and argued that the body politic should be understood as a fictitious body.

To conclude, I return to the idea of representation by fiction and adumbrate some of

its implications for understanding Hobbes’s account of the form of contract involved

in generating a commonwealth. In doing so, my aim is to re-orientate the way his

social contract theory is approached, although I do not develop a comprehensive

reinterpretation of that theory here.

Hobbes claimed that natural persons can be represented either truly or by fiction,

71 Hobbes, Leviathan, 180, 636–638.

72 Ibid., 1112.

26

and in the latter case men may be considered to covenant by fiction. A fictitious

covenant is not one that actually happened at some historical point in time. Instead, if

the covenant is fictitious, individuals need only to be considered as having laid down

certain rights to the sovereign, for by understanding their relationship with the

sovereign in this way they in fact do consent to being governed by the sovereign.

Hobbes made clear on numerous occasions that by accepting protection men

consent and are thereby obligated.73 In the terminology of Leviathan such consent is a

sign “by Inference”, which is a sign of the will that may be inferred from an

individual’s actions of forbearances.74 When describing the covenant that unites a

multitude into a person, Hobbes claimed that it is “as if every man should say to every

man” that he lays down his right of governing himself and authorises all the actions of

the sovereign.75 In thinking of themselves as if they have covenanted to generate the

commonwealth, individuals really do consent to give up their right of governing

themselves to the sovereign. At this stage reality and fiction become one.76 The reality

of protection is associated with the fiction of the covenant and men consent to the

sovereign’s power at the very point that they imagine themselves to have done so.

One of Hobbes’s contemporary critics, the Earl of Clarendon, was unwittingly close to

the mark when he commented that, for Hobbes, the “institution of Soveraignty is a

73 Hobbes employed the concept of silent consent in Elements, xiii.11; implied consent in On the

Citizen, XIV.12; contract by inference in Leviathan, 1133–1135; and defended himself on the point

against Bramhall in Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, 180.


75 Ibid., 260, my emphasis.

76 This reading thus explains away the paradox in Hobbes’s theory of authorisation—between real and

fictitious unity—identified by P. Springborg, “The Paradoxical Hobbes,” Political Theory, 37 (2009),

683–684. Also cf. B. Gert, Hobbes: Prince of Peace (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 133.

27

mere imagination”.77 Unbeknown to Clarendon, however, Hobbes had anticipated this

type of objection and had a rejoinder ready in waiting elsewhere:

Let no-one interrupt that ‘mere imagination’ is nothing; for imaginary motions,

inasmuch as they are imaginary, do not have the existence they seem to have. In

someone imagining, however, they are real, for ‘the imagination of motion’ is

the same as ‘motion in him who imagines’.78

Hobbes’s point was in relation to the imagination of time, which is the mental image

of motion. However, as for Hobbes everything was matter in motion, it is not too

incongruous to extend the point to his treatment of the institution of sovereignty. To

recast Hobbes’s claim in line with this interpretation, then, the last sentence would

read: In someone imagining however they are real, for “the imagination of consenting

(or covenanting)” is the same as “consent in him who imagines”. The consent and

covenant involved in Hobbes’s account of the generation of sovereignty is best

understood as imaginary.79 That the covenant is imaginary, however, does not mean

that it, and the obligation it generates, are not real, because, for Hobbes at least, real

and imaginary were not antonyms. On this reading, then, men do not actually ever

take place in a covenant but they come to conceive of themselves as if they had done

77 E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to

church and state in Mr. Hobbes’s book entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 49.

78 Hobbes, ‘De mundo’ examined, XXVIII.2.

79 See also G. Newey, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hobbes and Leviathan (London and New

York: Routledge, 2008), 121–123, 146–147. This interpretation of the covenant as imaginary is

different to hypothetical accounts of the social contract where the contract is treated merely as a

thought experiment, a point worth noting given that Hobbes is often read as a hypothetical contract

theorist.

28

so.80

Throughout his writings Hobbes recognised the power of opinion; indeed, in

Behemoth he wrote that “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the

opinion and belief of the people.”81 Political power rested on the ability to change the

opinion men have of the world, as to do so was to change the reality of the world

itself.82 Given Hobbes’s epistemology, however, men’s opinions and beliefs could be

transformed only by affecting their imaginations. According to Hobbes, “civil

philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves.”83 Yet

the way in which we make it is by imagining it, for the commonwealth is a fictitious

body and its unity and strength are no more than men imagine them to be. It is

therefore essential that men have the right images to correspond to their passions. If

men fear the image of the state of nature more than eternal suffering then peace may

be secured. If they conceive of their obligation to the immortal God as aligned with

their obligation to the mortal God then they see clearly. Hobbes hoped for a time

when Leviathan would be taught in the universities.84 He looked to the future and the

future is “but a fiction of the mind”.85 Yet the future is determined by what men

imagine it to be. Men need to have an image of the future that would guide their

action and it was this that Hobbes sought to provide. Hobbes wrote in a time when

peace was little more than a fiction and in Leviathan he supplied the images that

needed to be cast upon the minds of men if that fiction was ever to become a lasting 80 See also Stanton, “Hobbes and Schmitt,” 165–166.

81 Hobbes, Behemoth, 16; see also Elements, XII.6; On the Citizen, VI.11; Leviathan, 380.

82 See Johnston, Rhetoric, 70; Butler, Imagination and Politics, 170; Stanton, “Hobbes and Schmitt,”

166.

83 T. Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics, in EW, VII, 185.


85 Ibid., 44.

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reality.

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rousseau, nature and the transformation/ cultivation of ... web viewthe body politic “is a...

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