ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the development of Hobbes's political thought focusing on the problem of urban republicanism. I argue that signature developments in Leviathan respond to three compounding versions of urban republicanism. First is the general European idea that cities and boroughs are the communal wellsprings of republican ideas and practices. Second are the particularly British politics of the borough corporation and its relationship to the Civil Wars. Third are Hobbes’s own discussions of democracy in Elements. Against these three points, I argue that Hobbes’s theory of the state, representation, and the social covenant in Leviathan can be fruitfully understood as actively denying and undermining the problem of borough democratic and oligarchic republicanism.
