Thomas Hobbes's Person as Persona and ‘Intelligent Substance’
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Abstract
Although in The Elements of Law Thomas Hobbes used the word ‘person’ to denote a ‘person civill’, it was not until the English Leviathan that he introduced his definition of a person. In his subsequent works – the Latin Leviathan, De Homine and the ‘Answer to Bramhall’ – Hobbes also offered definitions of a person. However, although his later works brought about new variations of the definition from Leviathan, they did not succeed in clarifying his viewpoint on personhood. On the contrary, they seem to have obscured it even further. As a result, few authors have dealt with this topic, and the ones that do so have effectively limited their research to the sixteenth chapter of Leviathan, where Hobbes originally defined a person. The scarcity of scholarship on this particular topic is not as problematic as the relative uniformity of interpretations in the existing literature. This is quite remarkable if we bear in mind the importance of Chapter 16. This is the final chapter of the first part of the book which connects the two most important parts of Leviathan: Hobbes’s elaborate anthropological discussion titled ‘Of Man’ and the succeeding examination of the creation, functioning and properties of the state, entitled ‘Of Common-Wealth’. Hobbesian personhood is the first step to the seemingly oxymoronic account of an absolute monarch representing her subjects, taken in their totality, in just about everything she does, effectively shifting the locus of responsibility from the government to the people it represents. This can be problematic if the usual notion of representation is