‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State'

Quentin Skinner is Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. His Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) is an important work which helped to establish the ‘contextual’ approach to reading the classic works of political thought. In the following paper, he argues that Hobbes distinguishes between the state and the sovereign in a way that clarifies his account of the rights and authority of the sovereign.