Mediating Sovereignty in Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish

This article explores theories of mediation in examining sovereignty. An advantage of critical media studies is its capacity to consider macro and micro scales of meaning. The significance of radical transitions of scale to sovereign functions is clear at our digital moment. However, we find fascinating preliminary settings for mediated sovereignty during the mid-to-late seventeenth century, a period that saw radical remapping of sovereign powers. Revolutions in the forms of sovereignty are apparent in Thomas Hobbes's reading of the new Commonwealth through perceptual technologies and in the work of Margaret Cavendish, whose play with Robert Hooke's "design'd business" of magnified quantum worlds informed her hybrid fiction-philosophy.