By the time I got to the final draft, I had cut most of what was in this chapter because it went on and on about Blumenberg’s Genesis of the Copernican World and it was making the whole thing ungangly.
The new title of Chapter 1 in the final draft document was
Extant definitions of mimesis and their relevance for Hobbes scholarship.
Part I: Mimesis: the background of a key term
This dissertation identifies four dimensions of mimesis at work in Leviathan: theatrical, anthropological, poetic and linguistic. Each valence of mimesis belongs to a history of scholarship. Mimesis has appeared as an entry in several types of encyclopedias, including the Encyclopedia of World Art, A Companion to Aesthetics, the Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy, the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, the Encyclopedia of 162 Ibid., 114, 20, 221. University of Michigan. Humanities Text Initiative. and Oxford Text Archive., Bible King James Version (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Humanities Text Initiative, 1997), Book of Job 41:33-34. Aesthetics and the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.163 The variety of encyclopedias that claim mimesis as a relevant entry reflects the wide provenance of meanings the term mimesis has enjoyed. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis focuses on the poetic dimension of mimesis, tracing what this term implies in several seminal texts of the Western traditions.164 Scholars of literature have followed in this tradition, using mimesis as a lens to examine literature from Shakespeare to modern fiction.165 Linguistic mimesis has been addressed by commentators on classical poetry criticism, early modern art historians, and philosophers discussing the metaphor of sight for knowledge. What these scholars have in common is an interest in the history of thinking about how words do and do not create images that can be the basis of knowledge claims.166 The linguistic dimension of mimesis gained relevance with the rise of empiricism, because early scientific
163 T. V. F. Brogan, “Representation and Mimesis,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). David Edward Cooper, A Companion to Aesthetics, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1992); Edward Craig and Routledge (Firm), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London ; New York: Routledge, 1998); Paul F. Grendler and Renaissance Society of America., Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (New York: Scribner’s published in association with the Renaissance Society of America, 1999); Michael Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
164 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 50th anniversary ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
165 A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis : Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London ; New York: Methuen, 1983). Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis : Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ruth Scodel, Credible Impossibilities : Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy, Beiträge Zur Altertumskunde ; 122 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1999); Hayden V. White, The Greco-Roman Tradition, Major Traditions of World Civilization (New York,: Harper & Row, 1973); Mihai Spariosu and Ronald Bogue, Mimesis in Contemporary Theory : An Interdisciplinary Approach, Cultura Ludens: Imitation and Play in Western Culture ; 1:1-2 (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 1984). Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, Literature, Culture, Theory ; 12 (Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 1st ed. (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2004).
166 Gray, “Mimesis in Greek Historical Theory.” Claudia Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland : Jacques De Gheyn Ii (1565-1629), Cambridge Studies in Netherlandish Visual Culture (Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). David Michael Kleinberg- Levin and NetLibrary Inc., Sites of Vision the Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
communities developed standards for language use in their search for method, often mentioning the mimetic quality of some types of language use.167 Anthropological mimesis is addressed by Michael Taussig’s book Mimesis and Alterity, and identified by Gebauer and Wulf’s comprehensive book, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society.168 An aspect of anthropological mimesis I have identified in Leviathan is the problem of mimetic desire. The problem of mimetic desire as a feature of anthropology has been taken up by Réne Girard and other commentators on Romance and other fiction whose plots feature this type of behavior.169 The tradition of investigating the theatrical dimension of mimesis through the ideas of theatrum mundi and theatricality is also long. Minos Kokolakis has compiled all of the citations of theatrum mundi in the history of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Cervantes.170 William West’s Theatres and Encyclopedias in early modern Europe addresses connections between theatricality and epistemologies, and is a detailed examination of the significance of the theatrum mundi conceit in early English culture.171 Theatricality has also been linked to political authority in anthropological studies such as Clifford Geertz’s Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali.172 The modern state has been found to have a spectacle-like character by anthropologists
167 Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Shapin and Barnes, “Head and Hand: Rhetorical Resources in British Pedagogical Writing, 1770-1850.” Dear, “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society.”
168 Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity : A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis : Culture, Art, Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
169 Girard, Mensonge Romantique Et Vérité Romanesque. I do not agree with Girard’s approach to the study of literature in general, because it glosses over specificities in which, in my opinion the art of authorship lies, in favor of reading for structural properties. Nevertheless, the structure he identifies was discussed by Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in the Poetics. Kahn, “Hobbes, Romance, and the Contract of Mimesis.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Evelyn J. Harden, The Double : Two Versions (Ann Arbor, Mich.:Ardis, 1985).
170 Kokolakis, The Dramatic Similie of Life.
171 West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe.
172 Clifford Geertz, Negara : The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).
including Edelman and Kertzer.173 The spectacular nature of political authority and the theatrical aspects of society in early England have been examined by Stephen Orgel,
Stephen Greenblatt, and Stephen Mullaney.174 In the genre of political theory, Michael Rogin’s groundbreaking book Ronald Reagan: The Movie brought out dimensions of
theatrical and poetic mimesis in the American executive branch.175 Since theatricality has been so heavily documented in the history of philosophy and early modern English
culture, it is surprising that this is the first sustained examination of the role of theatrical mimesis in Hobbes’s Leviathan. In sum, each of the dimensions of mimesis I have identified in the Leviathan has been documented as a theme of anthropology, poetics, language philosophy, and theater studies respectively. This dissertation adds a discussion of what these dimensions of mimesis mean for the power/knowledge the future subject-citizens employ in constituting the modern commonwealth. Hobbes brings each of these dimensions of mimesis to bear on the central question of Leviathan, which is what is the know-how through which the future subject citizens artifice the sovereign?’ Reading Leviathan through the lens of the four dimensions of mimesis becomes a lesson in the political relevance of anthropological, poetic, linguistic, and theatrical mimesis.
Part II: Mimesis in the tradition of Hobbes criticism
Mimesis in the tradition of Hobbes criticism is comprised of interpretations that identify dimensions of mimesis in Leviathan, but do not thematize mimesis as the response to the question of future subject-citizen know-how. The poetic dimensions of
173 Murray J. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
174 Orgel, The Illusion of Power : Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations : The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage : License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England.
175 Michael Paul Rogin and NetLibrary Inc., Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, [Pbk. , 1988]. ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988).
mimesis have been identified by Michael Oakeshott and Sheldon Wolin under the guise of the mythological and dramatic character of the text, respectively. Terrence Ball
notices the linguistic dimension of mimesis as a central problem of the text, but comes to a different conclusion about citizenship than does this reading. Likewise, George
Shulman’s analysis of Leviathan is similar to mine in that he identifies the constitutive power of the multitude but like Ball, Wolin, and Oakeshott he does not see the ongoing
ethical and political relevance of the constitutive power Hobbes attributes to the future subject citizens in the form of the power of the imitative arts.
Oakeshott: Leviathan as the myth of the tamed man
Several of the best interpretations of Leviathan begin to read the text through the lens of mimesis, but stop short of developing the consequences of the mimetic dynamics of the text. Michael Oakeshott, for example, notices the mythological quality of Leviathan, or the poetic dimension of mimesis.176 The historical texture of the text transcends a particular empirical history to account for history in general, but Hobbes does not claim to write a universal history. Oakeshott’s attention to how Hobbes structures the text, leads him to argue that Hobbes inherited and redeployed a myth of creation, fall, and redemption. The human race, and the world it inhabits, so runs the myth, sprang from
the creative act of God, and was as perfect as its creator. But, by an original sin, mankind became separated from the source of its happiness and peace. This sin was Pride, the perverse exaltation of the creature, by which man became a god to himself. Thenceforth there lay in man’s nature a hidden principle, the antagonist of his happiness. But while corrupted man pursued his blind desires, an enemy of himself and of his kind, divine grace set a limit to human self-destruction, and promised a restoration of the shattered order, an ultimate salvation.177
176 Michael Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London Totowa, N. J.: Methuen ;Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 234, 56.
177 ———, Hobbes on Civil Association (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 151, 52.
Oakeshott’s summary of the mythological elements informing Hobbes’s narrative relates the historical texture of Leviathan. Myth entails an historical movement that claims the status of a pattern of history. According to Hobbes’s invitation to the reader, the demonstration of the doctrine depends on the judgment of the reader. The degree of generality the history of Leviathan attains is contingent upon the spectatorship of its readers. Hobbes inherits the idea of God as a creator, and of man made in the image of
God.178 The Creator and idea of man as imago dei both appear in Plato’s Timaeus and the Bible.179 Leviathan retains the biblical elements of positing a fall, identifying pride
as a sin, acting as an antagonist to one’s own happiness.180 The idea that men need to be redeemed is Biblical, but the Promethean character of the men who redeem themselves,
is inherited from Greek and Roman mythology.181 Oakeshott argues that Hobbes’s articulation of his typical history in the form of a refashioned myth centers the idea of deliverance, and the idea that man must deliver himself by coming to self-consciousness about his prideful nature and purging this passion by seeing himself in a man who rids himself of pride through fear. The precondition of the deliverance is the recognition of the predicament. Just as, in Christian theory, the repentance of the sinner is the first
indispensable step towards forgiveness and salvation, so here, mankind must first purge itself of the illusion called pride. So long as a man is in the grip of this illusion he will hope to succeed tomorrow where he failed today; and the hope is vain. The purging emotion (for it is to emotion that we go to find the beginning of deliverance) is fear of death. This fear illuminates prudence; man is a creature civilized by fear of death.182
178 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 9.
179 Plato and Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of Plato. University of Michigan. Humanities Text Initiative. and Oxford Text Archive., Bible King James Version, Genesis I, I:26.
180 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis. Oakeshott, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes.”
181 Jean Pierre Vernant, “The Myth of Prometheus in Hesiod,” in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, ed. Jean Pierre Vernant (Paris: Vrin, 1980).
182 Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 256.
Oakeshott is sensitive to the agency that Hobbes has refashioned several inherited myths, and created a recognizable story of redemption or deliverance. Oakeshott’s
interpretation recognizes God for Hobbes is a deus absconditas. As a result, the invocation of Prometheus attributes agency to the future subject citizens in the founding of the commonwealth. The deus absonditas and allusion to Prometheus sets up Hobbes’s argument that the analogy between the sovereign and God is based on alienation. Oakeshott notices that it is man’s distance from the redemptive God, which compels men to fashion a commonwealth as redemption for themselves. In Hobbes’s version, the destiny of man is ruled by no Providence, and there is no place in it for perfection or even for lasting satisfaction. Man is largely dependent on his own inventiveness; but this in spite of its imperfection, is powerful enough to create a civilized life out of the very fears and compulsions that belong to his nature and circumstance.183 Oakeshott recognizes that the general man in the state of nature has the agency to arrive at self-consciousness and overcome his pride with fear. My reading differs from Oakeshott’s because he does not pursue the idea that the becoming self-conscious simply is the virtù involved with citizenship. Instead, Oakeshott attempts to locate the cardinal virtue of magnamity, instead of noticing that virtue must be a standard of performance for Hobbes. In the end, Oakeshott concludes that in the commonwealth, subject-citizens
would remain too fearful to contest authority. He concludes that Hobbes’s is the philosophy of the ‘tamed man.’184 Oakeshott argues Hobbes’s Leviathan is a mythology in which the subject citizens end up redeemed and obedient. I argue that the mimetic dynamics indicate that the future of the Hobbesian commonwealth is what its citizens
make it to be.
183 ———, Hobbes on Civil Association, 153.
184 ———, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” 307, 39.
Ball: Hobbes scientizes the linguistic turn
Terrence Ball argues that Hobbes’s style is informed by his emphasis on the value of certainty in scientific knowledge. In arguing that political science is both created in
language and meets the criteria for a discourse of knowledge or science, Ball’s complaint against Hobbes is his “scientization of the linguistic turn.”185 Hobbes does this when he writes that rhetorical syllogisms ought to be like geometrical proofs.186 Ball acknowledges the creative power of men in the state of nature noting that since Hobbes
took up the linguistic turn, or put language use at the center of his epistemology, he must have realized that “language does not merely mirror the world but is instead
partially constitutive of it.”187 Ball recognizes that in the state of nature conflict is in part driven by the language use of “self-defining creatures of convention.”188 The disagreement I have with Ball is in evaluating Hobbes’s solution to the problem of linguistic discord. Hobbes argues, “it is annexed to the Soveraignty, to be Judge of what Opinions and Doctrines are averse, and what conducing to Peace,” and censor public discourse accordingly.189 This solution to disagreement, however, can be questioned from the vantage point of Hobbes’s definition of perspicuity as the scientific way of using language. Perspicuous language can clarify the meanings of terms and ought to serves as the standard for public discourse.190 Hobbes aspires for the sovereign to preclude all conflict in the civil commonwealth through exercising his office of defining terms. Ball’s argument is based on the presumption that the official definer of terms could be wholly successful. Interpreting the sovereign definer Ball writes: “civil
185 Terence Ball, “Hobbes’ Linguistic Turn,” Polity 17, no. 4 (1985): 754.
186 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 32, 34, 36.
187 Ball, “Hobbes’ Linguistic Turn,” 740.
188 Ibid.: 747.
189 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 125, 223.
190 Ibid., 240.
philosophy requires a conceptual purge, amounting to nothing less than the complete scientization of the political vocabulary. Just as geometers could not calculate without
first agreeing on definitions, so citizens cannot live together without sharing a common vocabulary of concepts whose meanings are fixed in advance.”191 Through an analysis
of mimetic language, I argue that the certainty in meaning is not the likely result of the perspicuous terms of public discourse. While Hobbes valorizes perspicuous discourses and clearly defined terms, the idea of a concept whose meaning could be “wholly fixed in advance” is unrealistic given the polyvalency of language, especially perspicuous language. Ball elaborates on Hobbes’s aspiration for a sovereign who could control language use to ensure transparency and consistency of meaning over time. “By definitional fiat the sovereign ensures communication, secures consent, and guarantees conceptual continuity of meaning from person to person and from generation to generation.”192 Ball summarizes the Hobbesian commonwealth as a “conceptually closed society.”193 This reading accedes to the idea that the meanings of term could actually be ‘fixed,’ concluding that a Hobbesian commonwealth is one without meaningful, critical spectatorship of the sovereign. “There can be, in Hobbes’s commonwealth, be no fundamental dissent. There can be no criticism to the effect that, for example, the sovereign is acting illegally or that the laws he has enacted are unjust, because there is no vocabulary in which dissent is intelligible and criticism communicable.”194 The citizen has no political agency in Ball’s account because he is pacified by the impenetrability of meaning of the
sovereign’s definitions. Obedient to the public conscience, according to Ball the citizen
191 Ball, “Hobbes’ Linguistic Turn,” 754.
192 Ibid.: 759.
193 Ibid.: 759-60.
194 Ibid.: 759.
could not “see” anything in perspicuous public discourse other than the sovereign’s definition.
Wolin: Leviathan as an authoritarian epic
Sheldon Wolin is another example of a political theorist who begins analyzing Leviathan through the lens of mimesis, yet arrives at the conclusion that there can be no democratic political agency in the context of the Hobbesian commonwealth.195 Wolin’s path to this conclusion is different than Ball’s because he centers his analysis on Hobbes’s agency in constructing the ‘epic’ of Leviathan. Wolin accounts for Leviathan’s attempt to teach his readers in a way that could lead to knowledge self-knowledge, and a new ethical orientation through poetic mimesis arguing Hobbes writes epic theory in order to affect his countrymen.196 Leviathan counts as an example of epic theory because he follows Plato in writing a text that outlines “a thought deed, a series of mental acts which pre-form in thought precisely what actors, when they are acting rightly, perform in fact.”197 Wolin notices that Hobbes does not detail the education and moral qualities of the ruler, as was typical in classical political philosophy.198 Wolin’s conclusion about this absence is not to notice that it is due to the fact that in modernity sovereignty is not comprised of a single figure but of many roles, as my reading argues. Instead, Wolin argues that Hobbes’s overlooking of the personal qualities of the ruler means that in Leviathan, rulership does not require any personal qualities. According to Wolin’s lecture, the uncertainties of rulership are overshadowed by the certainty of the epic style of the author. “When politics is treated as the medium whereby theory
is translated into
¹⁹⁵ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 118-9, 23.
¹⁹⁶ Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, 4.
¹⁹⁷ Ibid., 8, 9.
¹⁹⁸ Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 191. Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, 47, 48.
reality, political rulers are reduced to being members of a supporting case in a play where the dominant figure is the playwright.”199 Since all of the subject-citizens are puppets of Hobbes the author, then each remains pacified. Wolin argues that the scientific aims Hobbes had for his style, negate the dramatic potential of the text. Wolin observes that Hobbes’s organization of language creates an orderly political world in the text. “In reality, the logical dress with which he outfits his arguments serves rather as a
form of authority intended to command our assent.”200 For Wolin, the text is not dramatic because Hobbes does not elaborate the contingency of political authority. According to Wolin’s tracking of the metaphor between textual and political authority, Hobbes’s certain authorial style, means political authority certainly generates passive obedience. What a reader sees when he reads Leviathan is, according to Wolin, a political epic constituting “an attempted epitaph to politics.”201 Wolin recognizes Hobbes’s agency as an author, but he assumes that the author’s attempt at dictating the ethical orientation of the reader through poetic mimesis will necessarily be successful, or that the reader has no agency but to read himself as a pacified subject-citizen in the Hobbesian commonwealth. Against Wolin, I argue that the precise quality of Leviathan’s style is in fact that it is recognizably scientific, in the sense of meeting the criteria of the restrained style serving as the rhetorical standard of the scientific community, and at the same time, it incorporates elements of drama, specifically those outlined by Aristotle in the Poetics.202 Wolin does not lay the emphasis on the elements Hobbes inherits from dramatic
199 Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, 28.
200 Ibid., 33.
201 Ibid., 50.
202 Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. , 66. Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics. These include reversal and recognition, fear, pity and catharsis, and necessary and probable consequences. I detail how Hobbes uses these techniques in the next chapter.
traditions. For example, Hobbes emplots a scene of recognition and reversal, one in which a man arrives at knowledge, self-knowledge, and a change in ethical orientation.
This is the scene in which the reader ought to read himself, according to Hobbes’s invitation to the reader, nosce teipsum. Furthermore, Leviathan is animated by dramatic
elements in Hobbes’s definition of natural and artificial persons as mask-wearers. The covenanting moment can be said to involve a psychological dis-identification typical of
the dramatic aspects of early modern English trials.203 As a result of these dramatic features of the text, I disagree with Wolin when he says that What are missing from his account of theoretical activity are just the qualities, which suggest the novel, the unexpected, the extraordinary, and the venturesome. We are left with a profound incongruity between a rather prosaic conception of theoretical activity and the devastating consequences, which Hobbes would like to have us believe, followed from its use. In reality, the logical dress with which he outfits his arguments serves rather as a form of authority intended to command our assent.204 Wolin argues that Hobbes’s theoretical activity both professes to lack extra-ordinary qualities, but the effects or consequences typical of texts with novel, unexpected, extraordinary and venturesome qualities. I do not see why he maintains that Leviathan style is incongruent with its effect, when he also argues that the text “commands our assent.” In my view, it is not the logical dress but the dramatic qualities, which result in the “devastating consequence” of the effectiveness of the poetic mimesis. Wolin follows Hobbes’s authorial intentions so far as to argue that his style wholly succeeds because it is scientific at the cost of dramatic, while I argue that its style encompasses both. Leviathan’s style is not an attempted epitaph to politics because the reader retains
203 Holger Schott Syme, “Becoming Speech: Voicing the Text in Early Modern English Courtrooms and Theatres,” Compar(a)ison (2007).
204 Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, 33.
agency to assess the dramatic elements of the text, rather than passively suffer its devastating effects.
Shulman: Hobbesian citizens as Promethean and pacified
My reading follows George Shulman’s intepretation of Leviathan because he attends to the power that the subject-citizens exert in constructing the commonwealth, as well as the contingency that inheres in the very idea that the commonwealth is artificial. The state of nature Hobbes discloses is designed to expose the utter conventionality, or human construction, of truth and personal identity, property and social order, paternal authority and the family, culture and political authority. Then men can construct consciously the norms and practices they heretofore had attributed to God, nature, and tradition.205 Hobbes’s fault as a theorist, according to Shulman is positing nature as the repository of history. In my view, Leviathan reads like a text in which nature is the repository of history because the state of nature has a distinctly historical texture, while passive obedience in the content of the civil state, implies that men make no history once they become citizens. Shulman’s observation that nature is a repository of history is similar to my argument that there is no hard and fast line between the state of nature and the civil state, given that the state of nature has a social and historical history. Since Shulman conceives of politics as conflict, and Leviathan as the text about the scientific overcoming of conflict, then the transition from the state of nature to the civil state, an attempted disavowal of politics for him. Hobbes means to frame a historical situation in natural terms, which are conducive to a “solution” he construes as scientific. Whereas a historical or social analysis yields lessons for prudence and requires political action, nature appears susceptible to a scientific analysis and the application of technique, which Hobbes hopes would render politics superfluous. Indeed,
205 Shulman, “Hobbes, Puritans, and Promethean Politics,” 428.
his state of nature is designed to say that politics is part of the (natural) problem to be surmounted by the science he proposes in Leviathan.206
Shulman writes as though Hobbes could be wholly successful. According to this reading, the scientific discourse Hobbes introduces to ‘end’ the state of nature, could fully depoliticize the future subject-citizens, or provide a solution to conflict. I agree with Shulman when he states that Hobbes recognizes the conventionality of personal identity, truth, social order, and political authority. Unlike Shulman, however, in my view, Hobbes’s “solution” to the state of nature, the civil state, does not eliminate the possibility of political action or the conscious construction of norms and practices. Shulman identifies the problem as that of “creating an authority that prevents (any further) rebellion.”207 The means by which Hobbes attempts to do this is to argue that in the context of the civil state, citizens pursue their private felicity rather than act towards creating and sustaining a public good. “Hobbes reduces public actors with political causes to private men with particular interests.”208 Shulman laments that the civil state would be “untroubled by politics, human judgment, and subversive collective action.”209 Shulman’s reading exemplifies the tendency to read Hobbes’s account of obedience as though a commonwealth actually could prevent ongoing discord. The theatrical mimetic dynamics involved in citizenship, and mimetic language use, however, reveal that the appearance of the sovereign facilitates as much as it prevents the critical judgment of its citizens. Shulman notices the constituent power in the first half of the text, but does not elaborate on how subject-citizens could retain constitutive power. This dissertation answers Shulman’s question: “In what sense are
²⁰⁶ Ibid.: 430.
²⁰⁷ Ibid.: 436.
²⁰⁸ Ibid.: 439.
²⁰⁹ Ibid.
people, and can they be, creators who are genuinely involved in the process of collectively establishing norms and practice that shape them as individuals and as a community?”210 In my view, citizens perform roles of sovereignty, and in so doing affirm the norms and conventions related to their role. Spectators can respond to public
performances of sovereignty, or what transpires “in the name of the commonwealth,” critically.211 Furthermore, since the language used in public is inherently open to variety of interpretations, the sovereign definer cannot control the judgments of spectating citizens. In my view, tracing the mimetic dynamics shows that there is a contradiction in
Leviathan between the theatricality of political space, and the alienation of citizens from the sovereign. The theatricality of political space means that the distance between
subject-citizens and their sovereign can always be crossed through spectation, judgment, and enactment of the roles of sovereignty. Shulman comes to the other conclusion, that subject-citizens would be totally alienated from sovereignty. “At the heart of Hobbes’s dense and technical arguments is the estranging experience that people make themselves the passive creatures and powerless audiences of their own conscious creations, institutions, representations.”212 At the end of his book Radicalism and Reverence, however, Shulman intimates that citizens cannot be wholly pacified given the creative power Hobbes attributes to men in the beginning of the text. “They are
agents and creators; they continue to use language and politics in ways he ruled out.”213 I intend to elaborate this sentence through an analysis of the mimetic dynamics in
Leviathan, which detail the kinds of creative agency available to citizens.
210 Ibid.: 443 ft.3.
211 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 114, 20, 21.
212 Shulman, “Hobbes, Puritans, and Promethean Politics,” 433 ft.3.
213 George M. Shulman and California Digital Library. eScholarship., Radicalism and Reverence the Political Thought of Gerrard Winstanley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 202.
Oakeshott, Wolin, Ball, and Shulman are four examples of interpretations of Leviathan that begin with observations of mimesis in the text, and conclude that in the Hobbesian commonwealth citizens passively obey the public conscience. Oakeshott notices the mythological character of the text, which acknowledges Hobbes’s agency, but does not conclude the reader or general man has agency, instead depicting the Hobbesian man as ‘tamed’. Wolin notices Hobbes’s authorial choices in creating historical scenes in the text, but concludes that readers have no agency in whether or not they read themselves in the text. According to Wolin, the certainty of Hobbes’s style parallels certainty of obedience to political authority. Ball notices that Hobbesian men create in the medium of language, but concludes the sovereign could create a “conceptually closed society.” Finally, Shulman, like Ball, notices the degree of constituent power of the Hobbesian man exceeds any in the history of political thought, but concludes a sovereign could certainly quell all meaningful dissent.
Following these interpretations, the poetic mimesis explains why Oakeshott found the Leviathan to have a mythological quality and Wolin was able to identify elements of epic. Against Oakeshott’s conclusion that the Hobbesian man is necessarily tamed, I argue that mimetic dynamics continue to inform Hobbesian citizenship, and citizenship in turn could become critical, rather than tame. Against Wolin, I argue that there is not a trade off in the analysis of poetic mimesis between the text’s scientific and dramatic qualities, but that it encompasses both. The result of the dramatic qualities of the text, in my view and not Wolin’s, is that the text does not necessarily command the reader’s assent. Finally, this dissertation pursues Shulman’s insight that “Hobbesian citizens are agents and creators;” using “language and politics in ways he ruled out.”214
214 Ibid.
While Shulman recognizes the constitutive power in Leviathan, Hobbes’s famous tome is usually characterized as centrally about sovereign power. Since the sine qua non of the Leviathan is the frightening appearance of the sovereign, then in a sense might does make right in Leviathan. This means that the social covenant is not really about consent, and so the text as a whole is not about the legitimation of political authority. Furthermore, recognizing the theatrical character of citizenship does not provide liberal political theorists answers to the questions they pose of the modern commonwealth, which entails the best set of constitutionally guaranteed legal protections for citizens. Leviathan remains a text that is centrally about knowledge and power rather than a sophisticated account of law and legitimacy. Nevertheless, reading Leviathan with attention to the theatrical mimesis pervading the text illuminates Hobbes’s overlooked insights about constituent power and its ongoing exercise. Sovereign power, characterized by overwhelming force, has been conceptually reduced to the counting of weapons. The entire realist legacy in international relations can be considered a meditation on this aspect of Hobbes’s portrait of sovereignty. Recognizing the constitutive power created and maintained through theatricality, means that even in
a commonwealth that censors discourse, public fora are still possible. The bureaucratic government suppressing popular participation, also supplies the public with the tools of this participation. The ongoing constitutive power in Leviathan, open to citizens who act in the roles of sovereignty and those who critically spectate them could contingently
form a political space, a space in which questions of legitimacy could be posed. Reading the Leviathan focusing on citizen know-how and power illuminates the alternative to the authoritarian character of the Hobbesian commonwealth. Attention to mimetic dynamics demonstrates why there is political agency involved in the citizen’s obedience
to the political authority they generate in covenanting. In the scholarship on all four dimensions of mimesis, there is a notable absence of political philosophers. In my view, the themes of mimesis identified by anthropologists, scholars of literature, and students of the theatricality of Renaissance England, need to be drawn into relation not with empirical political events, but with the ways in which political philosophers draw on mimesis as the foundation of their analyses of knowledge and power. In other words, the relevance of mimesis to the constitution of the modern commonwealth is an overlooked topic in Hobbes studies, and a valid approach to early modern politics. In the context of Hobbes studies, the underappreciated significance of mimesis is the way in which it enables an interpretation of an ethical philosophy in Leviathan, as well as a portrait of citizenship that is far more participatory than previously thought. The theatrical mimesis integral to Hobbesian citizenship not only illuminates how constitutive knowledge/power may still be relevant in the context of the civil state, it is also a vantage point from which to question why Hobbes himself argues his text will fail as Plato’s Republic did.215 I will argue that theatrical mimesis means citizens can affect the normative consensus and interpretations of laws in ongoing ways, leading the reader to question whether or not the Hobbesian sovereign can unequivocally achieve peace, unity and felicity or whether disturbances to the coherence of these political values could arise from the performances and critical spectatorship of the subject-citizens themselves.
215 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan.
