The Concept of an Author and the Unity of the Commonwealth in Hobbes's Leviathan

The Concept of an Author and the Unity of the Commonwealth in Hobbes's Leviathan ANTHONY KRONMAN CHAPTER 16 OF THE Leviathan ("Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated") interrupts the flow of Hobbes's argument in a surprising way. In the three preceding chapters , Hobbes presents a vivid picture of the natural condition of man, indicates why men in such a condition would wish to escape it by entering civil society, and introduces the key ideas he later uses to explain the generation of the commonwealth. At the conclusion of Chapter 15, Hobbes has at hand an elaborate theory of the passions, a clear statement of the first two laws of nature (along with their corollaries), and an account of contractual obligation. At this point, the reader expects Hobbes to draw together the threads of his argument and complete the task he sets for himself at the end of Chapter 13 of showing how men, motivated by a passion for peace, may be "drawn to agreement" by the "convenient articles" that reason suggests. Instead of doing this, however, Hobbes turns aside in Chapter 16 to raise two new questions which seem to be unrelated to the carefully developed argument of his earlier chapters and to one another as well. The first question concerns the definition of a person and, more importantly, of an author. To be an author, in the special sense in which Hobbes uses that term, what qualities or capacities must one possess? The second question concerns the unity of political associations. What distinguishes a political association from a mere aggregation of men, and to what extent is the unity of a political association like or unlike the unity of other things (for example, the unity of a living organism)? The argument Hobbes develops in Chapters 13 through 15 is resumed, and brought to a conclusion, in Chapter 17. In many ways, as David Gauthier has noted, Chapter 16 appears to be a "somewhat irrelevant appendix or addendum";2 although the questions Hobbes addresses in Chapter 16 are interesting ones, it is unclear what bearing, if any, they have on the main line of his argument. Indeed, if the chapter were eliminated, it is not obvious that either the substance or continuity of Hobbes's argument would be seriously affected. This perhaps helps to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that in the large scholarly literature on the Leviathan there is relatively little commentary either on JLeviathan, ed. Michael Oakeskott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), p. 84. Subsequent page references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. 2 The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 120. [159l 160 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Hobbes's concept of an author or on his idea of the unity of the commonwealth, and almost nothing on the relation between the two. 3 In reflecting on Chapter 16, I have formed the view (a view shared by at least two recent writers) 4 that despite its brevity the chapter is one of the most important in the book and, far from being superfluous digression, contains ideas of fundamental importance for Hobbes's political theory and for his view of human nature. This paper offers an interpretation of the main ideas in Chapter 16. In the first part of the paper, I discuss Hobbes's concept of an author, and in the second part I attempt to clarify the relation between his theory of authorship and his conception of the unity of the commonwealth. My aim, in the third and concluding part of the paper, is to establish a few important connections between the ideas expressed in Chapter 16 and Hobbes's account of human reason. I. Hobbes's Concept of an Author word "person" in the following way: Hobbes begins Chapter 16 by defining the A PERSON,is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing, to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction. When they are considered as his own, then is called a natural person: and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of...