Personality, authority, and self-esteem in Hobbes’s Leviathan

Abstract

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the theory of the personality of the state put forward in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes’s account of political representation does not conceive of the state as a ‘purely artificial person’ or ‘person by fiction’, as Quentin Skinner and David Runciman have argued. Rather, Hobbes regards the state as an artificial person that is closely analogous to natural persons. The state’s integrity as well as the limits of its legitimate authority are based on normative constraints on impersonation that apply to a person’s self-representation as much as to political representation by sovereign authority. These constraints, it is argued here, result from what Hobbes considers to be the proper measure of individual self-esteem, a measure that eschews both inordinate pride and excessive humility.