ABSTRACT
The phrase ‘body-politic’ is often deployed to mean all of the people comprising a given ‘political’ unit, perhaps a country, nation or state, and sometimes conceived as the multitudes ruled over by a monarch or other supreme ruler. Thomas Hobbes’ great political tract of 1651 Leviathan carries a frontispiece, an etching by Abraham Bosse prepared in discussion with Hobbes, which is taken as a classic illustration of the body-politic (Olwig, 2002, p. 87), wherein the body of the king is literally composed of numerous tiny people all facing towards the king’s head (see Figure 1). Unsurprisingly perhaps, the people appear overwhelmingly to be adults, with the possible exception of one or two smaller figures, notably one just a little way up the lower portion of the king’s right arm. Might that be a child perhaps? The iconography of the image nonetheless conveys the impression that the body-politic, the massing of (human) bodies comprising the basis and target for political life, is predominantly an adult body—a body presumably ‘embodying’ the physical and mental capacities deemed essential, by most streams of Western political thought, for partaking in the conduct of political life. Hobbes and Bosse probably never gave it a moment’s consideration that these tiny people should all, or almost all, be adults (seemingly both men and women).
