Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 in Westport, near the town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England in the family of a curate, who fled to London and left his family under the care of his brother. The young Thomas received excellent humanistic education, centered on the study of classic languages – Latin and Greek (it was Hobbes who would later translate for the first time in English Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War’ and by the end of his life – Homers’ Iliad and Odyssey). Influenced by his teacher Robert Latimer, he went to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he took his bachelor degree in 1608. Immediately after that Hobbes started working as a tutor, companion and secretary for the family of William Cavendish – a landowner from Derbyshire, and, since 1618, the first Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes would keep that position for the following three decades until 1638.
Hobbes was promoted by the Earl of Devonshire but was not accepted by the burgesses and was unsuccessful as a candidate of the borough of Derby for election to the Short Parliament (1640). The turmoil of the epoch affected Hobbes in considerable degree. Expressing royal support during the transition from monarchy to republican commonwealth was most unhealthy and after the dissolution of the Short Parliament and the arrest of likeminded fiduciary of King Charles I, Hobbes fled to Paris, where he would reside for the following eleven years. It is in Paris that Hobbes would complete in 1651 his magnum opus, his most famous political treatise – ‘LEVIATHAN Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil’ (named after the enormous biblical beast that Hobbes likened to the political entity of men). The publication of Leviathan, just like the circulation of his earlier pro royalist treatise ‘The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’ put Hobbes in a delicate position – he managed to strain his relations with the exiled Court and to scandalise the Catholic church. Accused of departing from his principles Hobbes half fled and half returned to England in early 1652, where he lived to the end of his life in 1679. Even in the late years of his life Hobbes did not find peace, threaten by persecution and accusations of heresy, but managed to avoid them patronised by the king.
The ‘Leviathan’ (1651) is an attempt to explain and justify political obligation in so firm and unequivocal a manner, as to leave no possibility of anarchy, rebellion, revolt, or civil war. Hobbes begins with an examination of what the world is like in the absence of political obligation or civil society, in man's "natural condition." The state of nature is to Hobbes a state of war, the struggle of each man with every other for survival. There is no mutually recognised authority, no mutual trust. What becomes crucial, therefore, is the transition from this state of nature to "civil society," in which government and political obligation exist. To explain this transition Hobbes uses not only the device of the social contract but also his concept of representation. In his own words:
“A commonwealth is said to be instituted, when a multitude of men do agree, and covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsoever man, or assembly of men, shall be given by the major part, the right to present the person of them all, that is to say, to be their representative; every one... shall authorize all the actions and judgements, of that man, or assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and to be protected against other men.”
Hobbes’ notion of representation is confined almost entirely to chapter XVI of Leviathan, which is called "Of Persons, Authors and Things Personated." This has been a subject of analysis for a number of scientists. In a series of short summaries we will provide these views here, on ‘repregov’.
[Source: Skinner, 2002; Pitkin, 1967]
[Source: Skinner, 2002; Pitkin, 1967]
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