ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes’s (1588-1679) version of the body politic metaphor in Leviathan (1651) has been described variously as marking the fi nal phase of the classical commonplace metaphor of the state as a human body or as the start of a new tradition in the history of thought, refl ecting as it does the change from the ancient humoral model of disease to a more “modern” one that was inspired by new mechanistic and scientifi c re-conceptualisations of both physical and social bodies.1 Whilst these periodizing perspectives articulate important insights into a major discontinuity between traditional and modern versions of the metaphor in terms of its conceptual elements, they tend to gloss over the argumentative implications that follow from the main argumentative scenarios in which the metaphor is employed. In this chapter, these implications will be highlighted and characterised as laying the stress on a pathological view of the state-body, with view to linking them to metaphor versions that were formulated later during the Enlightenment and in the run-up to the French Revolution. The claim is not that Hobbes’s concept of the body politic in Leviathan directly informed or inspired the implicitly or explicitly regicide applications of the metaphor but that it opened the way for a thoroughly sceptical attitude towards the traditional head (= Prince)’s competence to effect necessary cures of the body politic once the latter had seriously fallen ill.
