ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what kind of polity is the European Union (EU) when it is located at the complex inter-zone between the national and the transnational in the classical light of Thomas Hobbes. It argues that people could learn about the EU by reading this European 'polity in the making' through the looking glass of classics. The chapter outlines the Baroque rationalism of the Hobbesian imaginary which retraces the motions of body. Such an imagination is clearly, though quite unsuccessfully, at work in his mathematical writings, and less clearly but more successfully at work in his political writings. Walker offers an acute reading of Hobbes which carefully avoids picturing him as a protagonist of static, linear, taxonomic thinking, in spite of the known fact that Hobbes praised Euclidean geometry as the foundational example of proper reasoning. He examines closely the relationship between sovereignties and boundary conditions. From the Hobbesian, radical, authoritarian, rationalistic, perspective, EU lacks in sovereignty as common power.
