Given a measure of hermeneutic charity, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan could be taken to acknowledge the validity of decision making by citizen jury:
“if the representative consist of many men, the voyce of the greater number, must be considered as the voyce of them all.” (Leviathan, Part 1, chapter 16)
The Leviathan frontispiece is composed of several hundred figures (which happens to be the minimum for a statistically-representative sample). So long as there are “many men” that’s all that matters – alteration of the numbers only affects the descriptive fidelity of the representation. Note that in the 1651 manuscript drawing, the heads are facing outwards towards the reader . . .
. . . whereas in the engraved title page they are reversed, reverentially gazing up at the figure of the “Mortall God”.
According to Keith Brown “the drawn version seems unquestionably the better expression of Hobbes’s ideas, as most people would understand them today, since the outward-looking faces make the point, important to him, that what the Leviathan wills is what we will.” (Brown, 1978, p. 32, my emphasis). Although the syntax is ambiguous, this could be taken to mean that the ultimate willing agency is the people, and Leviathan is an articulation of popular sovereignty. However, in the printed version the figures are turned round to face Leviathan, the role of the people being purely to authorise the will of the autocrat. Brown concludes that this is an example of “the draughtsman overruling the philosopher”, under the influence of religious, rather than political, considerations as the engraved design avoids possible visual references to depictions of “the devil whose name is Legion . . . [and] moves the adoringly contemplative host of the saved and blessed, familiar from the traditional paintings, into the silhouette of the Deity” (ibid.)
In the manuscript drawing, the people “although mainly dressed as gentlemen, but possibly including women, a priest in a skull cap and Geneva bands, some workmen and a soldier” (Goldsmith, 1990, p. 649), could be taken to be a ‘descriptively representative’ sample of the citizen body (given the very different franchise standards of the time). The two versions of the Leviathan illustration nicely depict our contemporary dilemma – popular sovereignty or populist autocracy? Hobbes is generally taken to be the philosopher of the latter (and Rousseau the former) and it would be ironic if this misunderstanding was the result of religious, rather than political, niceties. Although there is ongoing debate regarding who is depicted in the face of Leviathan (Charles, I, Cromwell, Charles II or even Hobbes himself) the orientation of the figures making up the body is a better indication of who’s will is being represented – the one or the many. This ambiguity (c.f. the title of Maurice Goldsmith’s essay) is nicely expressed in Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin’s aphorism “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
This analysis departs somewhat from the contextualist focus on authorial intentions and owes more to Roland Barthes’ essay La mort de l’auteur than Quentin Skinner’s ‘Cambridge School’ of hermeneutics. If every work is “eternally written here and now” then the (supposed) intentions of the author are of secondary importance.
References
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Brown, K. (1978), The artist of the Leviathan title page, British Library Journal, IV, pp. 24-36.
Goldsmith, M.M. (1990), Hobbes’s ambiguous politics, History of Political Thought, XI (4), pp. 639-673.
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