ABSTRACT
Modernity, nominalism, sovereignty There is probably no greater, certainly no more distinguishing, passage in modern political thought than the few dramatic lines which begin Hobbes’ Leviathan. So familiar is this startling opening that we need well remind ourselves how so striking an acknowledgment of sovereignty’s non-natural essence, so clear and bold a statement of the wholly artificial nature of sovereign authority, fell upon early moderns’ ears, how it registered in a world striving to dispatch anxieties associated with the retreat of the divine from governing affairs. At times Hobbes felt no need to conceal sovereignty as the work of artifice. He had good reason to make this dramatic admission his very point of departure. Sovereignty is wholly artificial because it is nothing less than a work of art brought about by man who must make it his business to imitate the natural work of God. God, Hobbes tells us, intended the creation of something wholly artificial but capable of becoming more powerful in stature and strength, this in order to effect the defense of what is natural, or man himself. The state is thus an artificial creation by means of a God with neither the intentions nor the will, and maybe not even the power, to bring it all about in a world of men. There is no need to feel anxious about the state’s unnatural beginning if it was ultimately linked back to divine intentions and earthly necessity. But the mechanistic Hobbes is here too – life is but a motion of limbs; the moving parts (automata) are capable of moving on their own accord. The task is to bring them all together, to coordinate their movements in the service of the creation of an earthly god. Hobbes called it a mortal god, his aim being to give the state a permanent, rock-solid foundation capable of outlasting men’s dangerously fanciful designs. Sovereignty is therefore something of a wish, the pacts and covenants resembling “that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation” (Hobbes 1994: 1-2).
