ABSTRACT
The frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is one of the few memorable pictorial representations of a philosophical idea. A huge man, whose body is composed of thousands of smaller people, towers above the well-ordered city below. The church spire is dwarfed by this giant who wears a crown and wields a sword in one hand, a sceptre in the other. This is the great Leviathan, the ‘mortal god’ described by Hobbes. The Leviathan, which appears in the Old Testament as a sea monster, is Hobbes’ image for the powerful sovereign who represents the people and is in a sense their embodiment: the multitude united in the form of an artificially created giant.
