Chapter 4: Theatrum Mundi: Staging the Covenant, the spectacle of sovereignty, and the mask of obligation

Chapter Three: The Theatre of Covenant and the Mask of Obligation

Theatrum mundi: the context of the social covenant

This chapter extends the sense in which men are agents in mimetic dynamics in the Leviathan. The previous chapter focused on Hobbes’s and the reader’s agency in the
mimetic dynamic between authors and readers. It also addressed the general men as language using agents moving one another toward normative consensus. This chapter continues with the theme that only by reading Leviathan for the way it employs mimetic dynamics, can the reader understand the political agency Hobbes attributes to citizens
as an answer to the question of the know-how through which modern political authority is constituted. The controversy surrounding the Leviathan among its readers with
democratic commitments, is that Hobbes’s portrait of sovereignty attempts to secure passive obedience indefinitely from its citizens.365 For all of its proto-liberalism, or novelty in acknowledging that there is a private life in the silence of the laws, Hobbes seems to depart totally from the idea that citizenship ought to be participatory, the
normative claim of democratic political theorists.366 Reading the theatrical mimetic dynamics in covenanting and citizenship, however, reverses this age old perception of
Hobbesian sovereignty. This reversal takes place by demonstrating the process of authorization and the activity of obedience, both involve mimetic dynamics—dynamics
through which citizens can achieve agency, and take responsibility for the sovereignty they created, and under which they live. Hobbes invokes theatrum mundi because he characterizes the appearance of a sovereign, a spectacle. The end of the state of nature is possible because of the “common Power,” that can “keep them all in awe.”367 The power must be visible, is termed the Sword, and can “tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and the observation of the Laws of Nature.”368 In a sense, the visual field of the multitude determines who covenants and who does not, since it is the force of the sight of the sovereign spectacle that ensures that man’s motives remain tethered to his reason for covenanting. Hobbes’s invocation of theatrum mundi is clearly evident in his genealogy of personhood to mask wearing.

365 Ibid.
366 Ibid. Richard E. Flathman, Thomas Hobbes : Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics, Modernity and Political Thought ; Vol. 2 (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993). Martel, Subverting the Leviathan : Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat.
367 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 102.
368 Ibid., 117, 20.

There are two main presuppositions concerning theatricality whose popularity occlude Hobbes’s positive valorization of the theatrical dimension of mimesis for politics. The first is Plato’s concern that ‘the threat of psychological assimilation,’ means that imitation destabilizes the soul.369 Hobbes however, aims to destabilize the souls of his readers to facilitate the general man’s self-knowledge. For Hobbes movement of the soul is not bad but required for the move towards goodness in the sense of abidance by the laws of nature.370 Considering Hobbes replaces the Platonic view of the soul with the materialist ontology and mechanical view of movement, Hobbes does not criticize anthropological mimesis, he attempts to prey upon it to teach and thereby move his readers towards political obedience. Secondly, theatricality has been widely associated with insincerity, which has made it an anathema to citizenship. Playwrights themselves reinforced the idea that the theater teaches actors how to feign sincerity, and that acting involves assuming an identity that does not reflect one’s true self. “Playwrights often used the concept of theatre as a metaphor for hypocrisy and deceitfulness.”371 Hobbes employs the conceit of theatrum mundi in order to make the opposite point, that in terms of defining oneself socially as a person capable of assuming political obligations the appearance of sincerity counts as much as sincerity itself. Leviathan does not contain an account of authentic versus feigned personhood. Hobbes changes the allusion of mask wearing from destabilizing one’s own personhood through feigning another, to the Roman tradition, in which mask-wearing was central to rituals which celebrated civic virtue.372 In my

369 Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems.
370 Hobbes does not have a concept of the soul similar to the ancients. Reason and ethical action are inextricable from the movement of the passions.

371 Postlewait, “Theatricality and Anti-Theatricality in Renaissance London.”
372 Harriet I. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford New York:
Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1999).

view, Hobbes’s revalorization of mimesis against Plato’s critique of mimesis is most clearly evident in the way he employs theatrical mimetic dynamics to explain the
generation of sovereignty and citizenship itself. Hobbes’s reliance on theatricality is evident as he draws a genealogy from the English term ‘person’ to the Latin word persona in the course of elaborating his use of the term person for the general man. “Persona in latine signifies the disguise, our outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes…Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same as an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation.”373 This analogy between actors on a stage and the everyday meaning of the term person, draws attention to the theatrical aspects of self-presentation in quotidian life, what Victoria Kahn has termed Leviathan’s ‘self-conscious theatricality.’ 374 Theatricality had strong cultural resonance in Renaissance England. The word “personation,” on which Hobbes builds his account of political representation, came into common parlance in Elizabethan England to denote individualized acting soliciting greater emotional engagement.375 The activities of acting and spectatorship comprised a central aspect of early modern English culture. Professional theater developed within Elizabethan society, involving all classes. “Theatricality extended from the elite people who attended court spectacles to the popular fold who participated in seasonal holidays. Throughout the year, a series of festivals and feasts occurred, tied to folk, civic, religious, aristocratic and royal events. And the theatres, were at the center of the

373 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 112.
374 Mullaney, “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage,” 77.
375 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 157, 66.

festivities.”376 Stephen Mullaney illuminates why theatricality would be important for the sea-change of social relations underway. He argues that “theater presents imaginary
social relations,” especially urgent to make sense of one’s conflicted society.377 In describing early modern theater-goers, Mullaney writes, “[w]hat was in doubt for them
was any reliable sense of a collective self.”378 In this chapter, I argue the social covenant which founds the political authority of the modern commonwealth entails theatricality, and can be contextualized in terms of theatrum mundi. Interpreting the social covenant as centrally concerned with theatrical mimesis leads to a new account of Hobbes’s normative and political philosophy. In my view, norm following, covenanting and citizenship are best understood as performances in which men spectate one another and their sovereign. I draw on the mimetic aspects of interpersonal behavior in Leviathan to argue that Hobbes presupposes a theatrical space of appearance across which men behold one another both in the context of problem of mimetic desire, the covenanting moment, and as citizens. As a result, on my reading, a theatrical politics in which appearance and spectatorship matter for witnessing and evaluating citizen acts remains contingently possible in Leviathan.

Performing the covenant, beholding the sovereign

The general men in the state of nature initially act according to an aristocratic ethos animating a competition for honor. During the covenanting moment, men face one another and agree to authorize all the actions of the sovereign. This chapter focuses on the covenanting moment and the resulting political authority, arguing that for Leviathan’s general man, becoming ethical and political entails a performance. The

376 Postlewait, “Theatricality and Anti-Theatricality in Renaissance London.” Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage. Chambers remains the most comprehensive account of early English theatrical practices.
377 Mullaney, “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage.”
378 Ibid.

success of the performance, upholding the duties of natural law and citizenship, depends wholly on the spectatorship and judgment of fellow covenantors and citizens. The
performative character of the covenanting moment is not surprising, considering the problem of mimetic desire driving the state of nature is based on how men feel when
they perceive one another.379 In order to change the social dynamic, Leviathan depicts a change in the direction of everyone’s gaze. The problem of mimetic desire comes to an end because everyone, simultaneously, looks up at the awesome spectacle of sovereign power.380 Hobbes turns readers into spectators by depicting sequential scenes of war, and he continues to evoke theatrum mundi by terming the sovereign a spectacle. The covenantors artifice the sovereign, and in turn it holds their gaze with awe. In the
covenanting moment men are acting yet they keep their covenant because they are fearful spectators of the sovereign. The covenanting moment, the moment when reasons are reconciled with motives for covenanting, requires both the activity of oath taking and the passivity of beholding the sovereign. The perception and action involved in the
problem of mimetic desire, shifts to a different organization of beholding and action due to the change in incentive structure created by the sovereign appearance. In the
covenanting moment, the way men act towards one another and vis-à-vis the spectacle of sovereignty accounts for the ability of citizens to assume the obligations they artifice
themselves. Since the relationship of ‘personation’ is the result of each individual authorizing the sovereign, the connotation of the theatrum mundi conceit is that the
covenanting process is a performance that conjures up the sovereign spectacle, turning

379 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, Ch. 10.
380 Ibid., 101, 17.

the actors of the covenanting process into its spectators. Individuals are actors who, in covenanting, transform themselves into the sovereign’s spectators and authors.381
While spectating a text is the key to the readers’ ability to learn the ethical teaching of Leviathan, beholding the sovereign creates an ethical organization of the passions of the general man, because fear ultimately prevents him from deviating from obedience to the laws of nature, or ethical norms of the commonwealth.382 The laws of nature comprise more than a specification of the golden rule. They outline those gestures of performance through which men can achieve compleasance, or accommodate themselves to others.383 By contrast, reading others’ performances for signs of honor previously served only to stoke greivous emotions.384 Frost explains what is different
about men’s performances as they become ethical by following the laws of nature, especially compleasance. Individuals’ subjective self-identity, their thoughts, and their desires are constituted and modified by their ongoing encounter and engagement with one another and with the world. So when Hobbes claims that ethics is about the consequences of passions, we must take note of the intersubjective and worldly character of the passions. More than this, we must understand him to be saying that ethics requires us to attend to the effects of our passions upon one another.385 Hobbes’s account of the generation of the polity is the same moment as the enforcement of an ethical orientation. This chapter explores how Hobbes puts an end to the anthropological activity of mimetic comparison with a spectacle of sovereignty.

381 Christopher Pye, “The Sovereign, the Theater, and the Kingdome of Darknesse: Hobbes and the Spectacle of Power,” Representations, no. 8 (1984): 86.
382 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 117, 18.
383 Ibid., 106. Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 120.
384 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 70, 88.
385 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 113.

Acting natural, acting artificial

Hobbes introduces the definition of person with a distinction between natural and artificial persons. Interpreters agree that covenantors can constitute persons.386 The
distinction between natural and artificial persons is used to designate two senses of being an actor. Whether or not a person is a natural person or an artificial person
depends on the evaluation of spectators.387 A natural person is he whose words and actions are considered his own.388 An artificial person is he whose words and actions
are considered to represent those of another. The distinction between natural and artificial persons is in the eye of the beholder.389 Hobbes draws further attention to the
conventionality of appearing natural, as he suggests a dramatic or theatrical genealogy of the term person. Men can “personate themselves,” means that they appear to one
another as though wearing masks.390 A natural person personates himself, by acting in his own name. Hobbes draws attention to the skill of acting ‘natural’, because in order
to successfully act in one’s own name, spectators have to perceive him as a ‘natural’ person.’391 The definition of a natural person, or acting natural, is a description of
beholding and acting working at the level of anthropological mimesis.

The theory of attributable action
The term ‘person’ comes to mean much more than the mask that a covenantor wears. It also refers to the body of the polity, the commonwealth, which Hobbes terms

386 Pitkin, “Hobbes’s Concept of Representation–I.” Skinner, Visions of Politics.
387 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 111. Lucien Jaume, Hobbes Et L’etat Représentatif Moderne, 1re éd. ed., Philosophie D’aujourd’hui, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986), 49. Jaume notes that the fictive or artificial person is not contrasted to a real person, but to a natural person, because for Hobbes, imitation cannot mean imitation of the real.
388 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 111.
389 Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” Representations, no. 83 (2003): 79. Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba”. Kahn argues that “a person is a theatrical rather than a legal figure, a disguise or outward appearance, a matter of convention,” while I agree, my argument is that I also Hobbes requires the theatrical aspects of a person to constitute the legal aspects of the same person.

390 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 112.
391 Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” 79. Kahn notes that the ‘natural’ is always already a representation.

the ‘person of the state.’ The multitude unifies into the commonwealth as the sovereign represents it. The sovereign representative acts on behalf of the commonwealth it
creates as it personates. The term ‘person’ becomes a highly technical term in Hobbes’s vocabulary in chapter sixteen, ‘Of Persons, Author, and things Personated’.392 The
multitude of individuals is united into one body politic, the ‘person of the state’ when each agrees to be represented by the sovereign. “A multitude of men, are made One
Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented;…For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One. And it
is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude.”393 The ‘one person’ that the multitude of
individuals become, is also termed the ‘person of the state’ or commonwealth.394 The ‘one person’ that represents the person of the state, and in so doing, unifies it, is the
sovereign. The sovereign is the representer that bears the person of the state. The reason that Hobbes’s complex usage of the term person is relevant to the appreciation of theatrical mimesis in the covenanting moment is that it forms the basis of the interpretations, against mine, which argue that the Hobbesian citizen is not a genuine political agent. Hobbes’s account of representation serves as the basis for the argument that the social covenant and citizenship are not about agency. Instead of specifically addressing issues surrounding power and the will, such as the vis of language or the mimetic dynamics, interpreters generally gravitate towards the idea that consent is supposed to result in an account of rational legitimation. Political theorists notice that Hobbes reconciles reasons and motives in the covenanting moment

392 Jaume, Hobbes Et L’etat Représentatif Moderne, 111.
393 Ibid., 114. Jaume notes that for Hobbes, ‘the people’ is not a natural entity, but has a genesis, p.50.
394 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 172. Synonyms for person of the state are Commonwealth, Civitas, and
Body Politique.

with his account of representation, but argue that he does so at the cost of not having an account of the rational legitimation of sovereignty. The problem is that Hobbes does not manage to separate his account of the authorization of the sovereign from the threat of force. Lucien Jaume notices, “the power is not established unless men obey the power they have established.”395 This articulates the paradox of the founding moment. Covenants without some threat from the sovereign are insufficient to command
obedience, yet the ability to threaten is possible only after all or most have covenanted, after the power of each has been ‘transferred’ to the sovereign.’396 The sovereign’s
appearance enforces the relationship of personation defining what it means to have founded a commonwealth. Since “the sovereign” appears to be the only relevant agent,
and since might makes right, Leviathan is usually interpreted as not having an active account of citizenship or an account of the rational legitimacy of sovereign authority.
On my reading, Hobbes installs exactly the kind of psychological assimilation Plato fears in the heart of the concept of sovereign representation. In arguing that the subject-citizens are the authors of the acts of the sovereign, Hobbes draws on the psychological assimiliation involved in spectating one another acting as artificial persons. The sovereign is identified with the subject citizens because what the sovereign does in the name of the person of the state are actions carried out by subject citizens, bearing artificial persons such as officer, deputy, judge, etc.. The sovereign’s actions are “avouched by the all, and performed by the strength of them all.”397 The subject citizens
can ‘avow’ what is done by the sovereign, because it is they, the subject citizens, who are carrying it out. Hobbes’s account of representation establishes what I term ‘mimetic

395 Jaume, Hobbes Et L’etat Représentatif Moderne, 70.
396 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 92.
397 Ibid., 123.

identification’ between the sovereign representative, the person of the state, and subject citizens. In other words, Hobbes suggests the propositions ‘the sovereign of England is at at war,’ ‘England is at war,’ and ‘the citizens of England are at war’ refer to the same event and mean the same thing. This is a departure from the classical senses of mimesis, which usually refer to mimesis as similarity rather than identification or sameness. Leviathan is characterized as an authoritarian text with no account of the rational
legitimation of political authority because his account of representation leaves no mode of limiting or contesting one’s authorization of an act of sovereignty.398 Once one has
authorized the sovereign representative, the subject must own up to all its acts.399 Copp argues that Hobbes’s account of representation allows “the actions of one agent that are performed in certain circumstances to be described as the actions of another agent.”400 When the subject citizens see that the sovereign is terrible, they are seeing themselves, i.e. the terrible potential of all their strengths united.401 Avowing the acts of the sovereign means acknowledging oneself “to be the Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act, or cause to be Acted.”402 The requirement of avowal of the actions makes sense because the subject citizens carry out the actions they have to avow. The action of the sovereign representative is narrowed to consist only in command, yet subject citizens carry out commanded acts.

398 Skinner, Visions of Politics, 182. Skinner notes there are no criteria for the sovereign’s misrepresentation of the person of the state.
399 Ibid., 183.
400 David Copp, “Hobbes on Artificial Persons and Collective Actions,” The Philosophical Review 89, no. 4 (1980): 603.
401 While the subject citizens ‘see’ themselves in the sovereign because each has to avow its actions as though he carried them out himself, and will have done so, acting as an artificial person, I do not think the kind of mirroring at work here, is related to Plato’s critique of art as the mirror of nature found in Book 10 of the Republic. There he critiques art works, or the products of poiesis. In my view, the sovereign is not an art object because it is defined by relations, and is not a static thing. Further, Plato’s critique of the
arts is informed by his similie of the divided line, which creates metaphysical categories to which Hobbes does not subscribe. Since the political world is radically autonomous from nature, for Hobbes, Plato’s critique of mimesis in Book X does not to speak to the relation between sovereign and subject citizen.

402 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 120.

Subject-citizens are both actors and authors of the commands of the sovereign on the basis of the mimetic identification between the subject citizens and the sovereign.
They ought to see fellow citizens’ official acts as theirs, and see their combined force in sovereign power. According to Hobbes, the mimetic identification which ought to
transpire in the avowal of sovereign acts does not take place through an assessment of the legitimacy of the action itself. “For they are bound, every man to every man, to
Own, and be reputed Author of all, that he that already is their Soveraigne, shall do, and judge fit to be done.”403 As a result, Hobbes’s account of authorization is a discourse of identification and avowal rather than a theory of legitimacy. Hanna Pitkin points out, the sovereign represents of the person of the state, but cannot, in Hobbes’s account,
misrepresent it, which means that the representative schema in Leviathan does not function as a rational standard of legitimation for the office of sovereignty.404 Pitkin
concludes that Hobbes has no coherent account of representation because it cannot be understood as a legitimating concept. The theory of attributable action is a way of understanding the covenanting moment as one in which the rational assent of each comprises a unified, rational, and morally correct general will, is to interpret the unification of wills in Leviathan as a precursor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, forgetting Hobbes’s unique view of the will, indebted to his mechanico-materialist ontology.405 Since power, not reason makes laws in Leviathan, authority is inextricably tied to the meaning of the sovereign’s spectacle of power but not to a rational standard of legitimation.

403 Ibid., 122.
404 Pitkin, “Hobbes’s Concept of Representation–I.”
405Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 44, 47. Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections onEthics and Politics, 112. 

Authorization is a term that is used by Hobbes to refer to the mimetic identification between sovereign, commonwealth and citizens as an argument for the sovereign’s immunity from complaint. Because every Subject is by this Institution Author of all the Actions, and Judgments of the Soveraigne Instituted; it followes, that whatsoever he
doth, it can be no injury to any of his Subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of Injustice. For he that doth any thing by authority from another, doth therein no injury to him by whose authority he acteth: But by this Institution of a Commonwealth, every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his Soveraigne, compalineth of that whereof he himselfe is Author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himselfe; no nor himselfe of
injury; because to do injury to ones selfe, is impossible. It is true that they that have Soveraigne power may commit Iniquity; but not Injustice or Injury in the proper signification.406 The mimetic identification with the sovereign creates the effect that every act of the sovereign is one’s own act. This identity is what pacified citizens are supposed to perceive in sovereign acts. When Hobbes alludes to the Socratic adage that no one intentionally injures himself, he is alluding to the identity of sovereign, the
commonwealth, and its authors, the subject-citizens.407 The account of authorization immunizes the sovereign from rational critique by identifying sovereign actions with
individual avowal. According to Jaume, the Hobbesian conception of representation is mixed, because it suggests both the notion of a mandate, or speaking in the name of, and lieutenance, taking the place of. The sovereign is both designated by the people to represent them, and substitutes for the people.408 Pitkin describes the mimetic
identification as follows: “The one man acts, and the other bears responsibility for the consequences as if he had acted himself. Represenation is authority, the right to make
commitments and incur consequences for another. Thus, the representative has

406 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 124.
407 Ibid.
408 Jaume, Hobbes Et L’etat Représentatif Moderne, 66. 

enlarged rights to act, while the represented have new responsibilities.”409 Pitkin draws attention to the fact that Hobbes’s account of representation bears little resemblance to the modern concept of representative government. “The sovereign he envisions does not seem to us a representative at all. Nothing has been said about his consulting the
people’s wishes, protecting their interests, being responsible to them.”410 For Hobbes, representative government is not about accountability. In Hobbes scholarship, the account of sovereign authorization in the covenanting moment is referred to as the theory of attributable action, and most interpreters agree with Pitkin and Skinner, concurring that men do not have agency in the representational structure. Obedience is the result of the social covenant because any act by a person acting on behalf of the office of sovereignty or in the name of the commonwealth is authored by and must be avowed by each and every citizen.411 I interpret this passage to mean that subject citizens ought to identify with agents who act in official capacities, and what this identification means, is that the subject citizens ought to be psychologically assimilated with actors who act on behalf of the commonwealth, or those carrying out the office of sovereignty. The theory of attributable action or mimetic identification in Hobbes’s account of the covenanting moment as the endless authorization of the sovereign confuses the sense in which citizens can be held ethically responsible for sovereign acts. In addition
to not holding men accountable when they act as office holders of sovereignty, the theory of representation makes all subject citizens “jointly committed to taking responsibility for what the sovereign does,” but “tells us nothing about how they are to

409 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Representation, [1st ] ed. (New York,: Atherton Press, 1969), 8.
410 Ibid.
411 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 122.

take responsibility.”412 The representative schema of governance makes norm and law following dependent on processes of mimetic identifications between the sovereign, the commonwealth, and the subject-citizens. If the processes of mimetic identifications could not fail, then ethical responsibility would be absent from the scene of politics. I
will argue that an analysis of theatricality in the covenanting moment and citizenship leads to a different understanding of the possibilities of citizenship entailed with avowal
and obedience. While I concur that there is no account of rational legitimation of sovereignty, there way is a sense in which citizens are not simply passively obedient, but
have opportunities to shape the normative consensus and political direction of their polity. In the theatrical space that can be created by citizens, questions of legitimacy could arise.

Theatrical mimetic dynamics

On my reading, the performative character of interaction in the state of nature, the theatrical dynamics of the covenanting moment, and the characterization of sovereignty as spectacle, mean that Hobbesian citizenship is best thought of as theatrical, and the commonwealth a theatrical space. In my view, theatrical mimetic dynamics illuminate the agency available to citizens. According to Hobbes’s absolutist vision, subject citizens will perform the laws of nature and avow all acts done in the name of the commonwealth towards the end of peace. The mimetic dynamics entailed in Hobbesian politics and ethics, however, do not necessarily work towards or against the absolutist ambitions, because Hobbes’s reliance on theatricality and perspicuity leaves open the possibility of a politics of spectatorship and action.413 According to this
412 

The representative schema of governance makes norm and law following dependent on processes of mimetic identifications between the sovereign, the commonwealth, and the subject-citizens. If the processes of mimetic identifications could not fail, then ethical responsibility would be absent from the scene of politics. I will argue that an analysis of theatricality in the covenanting moment and citizenship leads to a different understanding of the possibilities of citizenship entailed with avowal and obedience. While I concur that there is no account of rational legitimation of sovereignty, there way is a sense in which citizens are not simply passively obedient, but have opportunities to shape the normative consensus and political direction of their polity. In the theatrical space that can be created by citizens, questions of legitimacy could arise.

Theatrical mimetic dynamics

On my reading, the performative character of interaction in the state of nature, the theatrical dynamics of the covenanting moment, and the characterization of sovereignty as spectacle, mean that Hobbesian citizenship is best thought of as theatrical, and the commonwealth a theatrical space. In my view, theatrical mimetic dynamics illuminate the agency available to citizens. According to Hobbes’s absolutist vision, subject citizens will perform the laws of nature and avow all acts done in the name of the commonwealth towards the end of peace. The mimetic dynamics entailed in Hobbesian politics and ethics, however, do not necessarily work towards or against the absolutist ambitions, because Hobbes’s reliance on theatricality and perspicuity leaves open the possibility of a politics of spectatorship and action.413 According to this

412 David Runciman, “What Kind of Person Is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” The Journal of Political Philosophy no. 8 (2000): 273.
413 Paul A. Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

reading, a theatrical politics in which citizen performances can affect the normative consensus and interpretation of commands means that meaningful political and ethical
agency would still be possible for Hobbesian citizens. In my view, attending to the theatricality of the covenanting moment lends sense to Hobbes’s narrative, and so is central to the teaching of what politics amounts to rather than a simple etymological observation. In chapter sixteen, Hobbes argues that the juridical sense of ‘person’ was borrowed from an originally theatrical discourse. “Persona, in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage;…And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters.”414 Hobbes uses Cicero as an example of what it means to act in someone’s name or beare his Person. He argues he is using the idea that one person can ‘bear the person of another’ in the same sense that Cicero claims to “beare three Persons; my own, my Adversaries, and the Judges.”415 This example demonstrates Hobbes was attentive to the theatrical aspects of courtrooms. The whole movement of the chapter can be defined as the translation of the idea of representation from theatrical acting to the juridical moment of covenant. At first glance, Cicero’s ability to represent the competing interests involved in a law case is a different kind of juridical moment than the constitution of a new polity. Imagining other points of view in preparation for a trial, presupposes a system of right already in place, whereas covenanting is the moment in the plot in which the system of right is coming into being.416

414 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 112.
415 Ibid.
416 Ibid., 100.

Psychological disidentification  in authenticating performances

Cicero’s ability to represent persons is not wholly unrelated to Hobbes’s aim of explaining why he uses the term ‘person’ in his account of covenanting. Since men in the state of nature appear to one another, the war of each against all can be thought of as role-play. In the context of mimetic desire, social relations are discordant because each man wants to play the same role, the role of the dominant and honored.417 The state of nature is not necessarily a time of real battle, but a time when “the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.”418 Men read gestures of honor and dishonor in the appearances of others, and finally the desire to do battle. Michel Foucault interprets this passage to mean the state of nature is a “theater of presentations.”419 The covenanting moment entails a change in the way men present themselves, act, or appear towards one another. Covenanting requires men appear to one another as mutually trustworthy and capable of assuming the rights and obligations of citizenship. This is a change in ethical comportment vis-à-vis one another, because the covenantors are no longer appearing to one another as enemies, but now as fellow citizens. Cicero’s legal preparation involves the kind of fictional role-playing Plato criticizes in Book III of the Republic. Halliwell explains that the ethical consequences of mimesis derive from a psychological self-likening to the characters imitated. The actor or reader engaged in fictional role-playing invites a powerful psychological effect on his soul. Taking on the persona of a character results in “psychological assimilation,” which “shapes the disposition of the agent.”420 Plato draws attention to the power of the external poetic performance to be internalized, in what Halliwell terms a

417 Ibid.

418 Ibid., 88.
419 Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76, 92.
420 Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, 75.

“psychological-cum-ethical attraction and assimilation”.421 Holger Schott Syme’s analysis of the theatricality of English political life illuminates why Hobbes would have used Cicero as an example to explain the persons covenanting by drawing on the dynamic of psychological assimilation. Schott Syme argues that oral performances established the authenticity of statements in early English courts of law. The court clerc bore the person of the witnesses, reading aloud their written depositions.422 In these performative practices, speech acts were controlled by written documents, but the oral performance remained the overt source of authenticity.423 Oral performative practices authenticated other transactions with political import as well. Schott Syme’s examples include “the reading of royal proclamations from pulpits and in town squares,” and scribners reading “out letters and legal deeds to their illiterate clients.”424 Schott Syme argues that the oral performance was privileged over the written text in English legal and political culture because “in some cases reading aloud was necessary to reveal the very meaning of documents.”425 These observations help the reader of Leviathan understand the relevance of Hobbes’s use of Cicero’s impersonation of other’s views in the preparation of his legal case. Hobbes depicts covenanting as an oral exchange.
This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly

421 Ibid.
422 Schott Syme, “Becoming Speech: Voicing the Text in Early Modern English Courtrooms andTheatres.”
423 Ibid. Pitkin, “Hobbes’s Concept of Representation–I.” Pitkin begins this line of reasoning but aborts it because she does not draw on the culture of oral performances as possible authentic.
424 Schott Syme, “Becoming Speech: Voicing the Text in Early Modern English Courtrooms and Theatres.”
425 Ibid.

of men, on this condition, that thou give up they Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.426 The commonwealth is constituted by the mutual oral performances of all of the future subject-citizens vis-à-vis each other. The oral constitution of the Leviathan is similar to the authenticating oral performances of court clerks, scrivners and cryers because it involves the covenantors performing “a gesture of at least temporary and partial self-disavowal.” 427 The covenantors must disavow their personas of enmity vis-à-vis one another, just as Cicero disavows his own identity in his imagination as he prepares his legal case. Covenantors disavow the aristocratic ethic as they perform for one another the Christian virtues outlined by the laws of nature, culminating in the covenant. Schott Syme’s point is that oral performance served as the means of authenticating public political and juridical events in early modern England. Authenticity was accomplished by the performance. The authentification process entails a disidentification because the oral performer is not speaking in his own voice, and so is dis-identified with his usual role. For example, “a priest reading a proclamation of the King, the priest vanishes in a sense, the successful delivery of the proclamation is predicated on the assumption that the priestly reader disappears, becomes inaudible, as the royal voice sounds forth.”428 In orally performing the covenant, the citizens of Leviathan are disidentified from their state of nature selves. In my view, Plato’s critique of mimesis is based on this process of disidentification, yet Hobbes draws on disidentification and the theatrical resonances of the term person. The covenantors are persons by virtue of their acting, because person

426 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 120.
427 Schott Syme, “Becoming Speech: Voicing the Text in Early Modern English Courtrooms aand Theatres.”
428 Ibid.

means actor. The distinction between natural and artificial person is not based on any metaphysical concept of nature.429 Rather, Hobbes depicts a playful interchange between being perceived as natural or artificial. A covenantor may be perceived as a natural person. The implication here is that in the state of nature he was not acting himself, or not true to himself. Once he recognizes the right reason of his conscience, and covenants, he returns from his artificial mask of enmity to natural law following and
citizenship. However, since Hobbes emphasizes the artificiality of the commonwealth, the dynamic between natural and artifical personhood can be thought of in the opposite
way. A covenantor perceived as an artificial person, means his words are not his own. This makes sense because his words are those of Hobbes, in other words, the covenantor follows the script Leviathan lays out. The covenantor’s status as an artificial person, disidentified from his former self, does not diminish but establishes the authenticity of the covenant, if we concede that in Leviathan, as in English culture generally, oral performances authenicate political and juridical events. Plato argues that the ethical malleability incited by the possibility of disidentification from oneself in imitating another constitutes a change of ethical orientation that can continuously destabilize a
soul, because it encourages a person to think of himself as dissociable from his role.430 Hobbes recognizes the risk inherent in establishing a covenant among ethically
disidentified subjects. The problem in the covenanting moment is that a covenantor may not feel secure in his fellow’s disidentification with his former, dominance pursuing self. Hobbes himself mentions that the covenantor may reneg, which is the purpose of making the sovereign frightening.431 In drawing on the possibility of ethical

429 Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, 67. Jaume, Hobbes Et L’etat Représentatif Moderne, 49.
430 Plato, The Republic, 391 d-e, 93c-d.
431 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 102, 17, 18.

disidentification through oral authentification of covenant, Hobbes exploits the psychological power of imagining a new identity to secure the transition of ethical identities of his reader, from aristocratic warrior to Christian citizen. The disidentification from one’s self involved in mimesis, is accompanied by a psychological assimilation to the character or text imitated. Halliwell explains the process of disidentification and psychological assimiliation is precisely what creates Plato’s anxiety over dramatic personation in the Republic. The identification involved in performing or reciting dramatic poetry represents a threat to the soul’s unity, because the operation of “self-likening” the enactment of experiences fictionally other than one’s own, requires the mind to discover within itself, so Plato believes, the nature of what it is brought to imagine. Drama invites and leads us to discover other possible lives, and, in the process, to make them psychologically our own.432 As the covenantor recites the language of covenant, he psychologically self-likens to his new self, the kind of person who would author and act in accordance with the covenant. The disidentification from the old self and psychological likening to the covenantor involves the kind of psychological shift the text needs to depict. Schott Syme notices that theatrical acting in early modern England was assessed by whether or not it achieved the psychological assimilation involved in the actor’s imitation of a dramatist’s text. In the standard for great acting, the physical body and voice of the actor are no longer considered his own, but fully the character.433 For actors, all that matters in court and theatre are the characters to whom their bodies play host.434 Burbage, widely regarded as the greatest actor of the period, counts as an artificial person when he allows the text to inhabit his body.435 Disidentified from

432 Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, 93.
433 Schott Syme, “Becoming Speech: Voicing the Text in Early Modern English Courtrooms and Theatres.”
434 Ibid.
435 Ibid.

Burbage the actor, he personates Hamlet or Othello.436 In the courtroom, the oral performance that authenticates a deposition or royal proclamation “culminates in a
perfect as if… the speaker was becoming spoken by the text.”437 The psychological assimilation of an actor to the text he is performing is the kind of psychological
assimilation the covenanting moment demands of its actors and readers. When a covenantor succeeds in letting the text speak him, his spectators absorbed in the performance, will believe he sincerely authorizes the covenant and is prepared to assume civil rights and political obligations in exchange for giving up his unrestricted pursuit of natural right. Future subject citizens in the covenanting moment are actors and spectators, who need to be spoken by Hobbes’s text of the covenant, and spectate one
another as if his fellows were as trustworthy, serious, and sincere as they act.

Covenanting without counter-assurance of authority

Extensive debate in the secondary literature on the role of personation in the covenanting moment, arises due to the fact that in chapter sixteen, Hobbes ostensibly discusses covenanting in general, and not specifically the foundational covenant his plot demands. The example of covenanting Hobbes gives that fits most closely with his definition of person as actor, and the idea that the oral performance itself authenticates, is the situation in which a man, the first person, covenants with another, the second person, who is representing or personating a third. In this case, the second person is the authorized representative of the third. This situation can be risky for the first person, in case he does not know if the third person indeed authorized the second to make the covenant on his behalf. Hobbes is drawing attention to the possibility of a

436 Ibid.  

437 Ibid.

person obliging himself with a covenant, even if he is not physically present, because he can send an authorized representative to covenant on his behalf. This covenant could be ruled invalid if the second man was indeed not authorized by the third, or if the covenant in some way exceeds the bounds of the authority delegated to the second man.
And therefore he that maketh a Covenant with the Actor, or Representer, not knowing the Authority he hath, doth it at his own perill. For no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author; nor consequently by a Covenant made against, or beside the Authority he gave.438 In this case the third person should not be held responsible for those terms of the covenant that go beyond his commission to his representative. Hobbes entertains the situation in which a covenanter (the first author) asks for verification of authority from the representative (the second person), and concludes that if it cannot be produced, the covenanter (the first person) is not obliged. Covenanting requires a “counter-assurance” of authorship, since someone other than the author can complete the act. “And he that maketh a Covenant with the Author, by mediation of the Actor, not knowing what Authority he hath, but onely takes his word; in case such Authority be not made manifest unto him upon demand, is no longer obliged: For the Covenant made with the Author, is not valid, without his Counter-assurance.”439 In cases where counter-assurance of authority is demanded, if the second person could be unauthorized, the first and the third may be excused from obligation. Next Hobbes considers the case in which the first person has no counter-assurance of the authorship of the second person, that he indeed represents the third. Instead of arguing that everyone is dismissed from obligation, Hobbes makes the argument that in feigning authority, a person can obligate himself. This accords well

438 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 112-13. This seems like a crypto warning against allying with Cromwell.
439 Ibid., 113. 

with the situation of the authorization of the sovereign because persons coming out of the state of nature are incapable of producing assurances of their right to authorize anything in a legally valid sense. In the situation in which the covenanter (the first person) has only the actor’s word he is duly authorized, the covenant is valid because the actor, the second person, in and through acting authoritative, obliges himself (but not the third person). But if he that so Covenanteth, knew before hand he was to expect no
other assurance, than the Actors word; then is the Covenant valid; because the Actor in this case maketh himselfe the Author. And therefore, as when the Authority is evident, the Covenant obligeth the Author, not the Actor; so when the Authority is feigned, it obligeth the Actor onely; there being no Author but himselfe.440 In this case, that of a covenant with a representer who cannot validate his authority to the first person means that the first and second person have obliged themselves while the third person is left out of the situation. This example is parallel to the hypothetical situation of the transition from the state of nature to the civil state because no counterassurance would be available without a system of right. Men could act in covenanting, but only give each other the assurance of their ‘word’. This passage suggests that one can oblige himself through feigning authority.441 Any person can authorize a covenant, not because he has the authority to, but because in acting authoritative or feigning authority, he makes himself an author. Hobbes’s maintains a theory of attributable action even if the authorship of a covenant is unverifiable because men can create obligations for themselves ex nihilo by acting.442 The author of the actions does not need to have any claim to a ‘right’ to do what he is doing. Rather, in acting, he makes himself

440 Ibid.
441 Runciman, “What Kind of Person Is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” 275.
442 This reading resonates with the introduction of Leviathan because according to voluntarist theology, the comparison of man’s power with god’s has to do with creative power of will. 

the author, because he will be perceived to be the author, acting on his own behalf. The consequence of feigning the authority to covenant is that being perceived as an author
of a covenant, one becomes an author. Hobbes participates in the idea that being a role involves being perceived as that role. In terming the covenantors ‘persons’ meaning actors or mask wearers, Hobbes was not accusing his readers or the future subject citizens of hypocrisy or deceitfulness, the conclusions about actors reached by the
Puritan anti-theatrical prejudice. Instead, in accounting for the covenant by arguing actors can authorize their own covenants, Hobbes draws on theatricality, or the idea that men can play with their appearance vis-à-vis others. Whether a man is considered a natural or artificial person depends on spectator response and evaluation. The difference between the two types of mimetic identification that of the state of nature and that of the civil state is that in the latter condition men are not only looking at one another, but also beholding the awesome power of their forces combined. The spectacle of sovereignty, in the background of the quotidian actors carrying out the office of sovereignty, changes the context or theatre in which the mimetic dynamics take place. The sovereign’s ability to enforce its laws sets up an incentive structure for actions, which differs from the situations of the state of nature. The covenanting moment marks a new act in the drama of the pursuit of natural right. The problem of mimetic desire, in the sense of a competition for honor, continues to occur in the civil state, but all honors are defined and awarded by the sovereign, and fear of punishment prevents the competition for honor from escalating to the level of mortal violence.443

443 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 212. 

Instead of looking to one another for signs of honor, the subject citizen looks to the sovereign, which dispenses honors.444

Acting establishes a man’s status: Hobbes and Castiglione

The covenanting moment marks a change in the concept of equality at play in Leviathan. The condition of the equal ability to kill is abandoned in favor of equality under the law. The very idea that all future subject citizens would be equal makes Hobbes a very early political philosopher to surpass the aristocratic prejudice prevalent in classical political thought. In arguing that each ought to covenant with all, Hobbes departs from extant suggestions concerning citizenship requirements such as requiring land, wealth, or a certain level of education as a caveats of citizenship. More importantly, a high social status is no longer considered a birthright tied to land or blood inheritance, rather it is now perceived as dependent on social performance. The sense of equality in mutual performance and the dissolving of privilege into reputation mean that Leviathan may have been inspired by Baldesaare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, or early English courtesy books, in which aristocratic status transforms into the know-how of manners.44 Castiglione associates ethical and political action in the figure of the courtier. The Book of the Courtier, first published in 1528, was first translated into English by Thomas Hoby.446 Leviathan is not a guide to the manners of courtiers because sovereignty is an abstract office, which could be held by a monarch or a Parliament. Leviathan was a guide to contemporary conduct insofar as Hobbes wanted to affect his

444 Ibid., 126.
445 Castiglione, Hoby, and Henderson, The Book of the Courtier. Whigham, Ambition and Privilege : The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Dolven and Ebooks Corporation., Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 71.
446 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier : The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, viii, 1. 

readers, help them to recognize the ethics of the laws of nature.447 A point of contrast between the texts is that the aim or end of covenanting, obedience and felicity differs
from Castiglione’s emphasis on being deserving to advise the most worthy Prince.448 This point of contrast is also a reason Hobbes may have drawn on Book of the Courtier.
In Leviathan, citizens in a sense are the sovereign, as they carry out acts done in the name of the commonwealth. Despite the differences in the respective accounts of the organizational structure of sovereignty, in my view, Castiglione’s concepts of grace and sprezzatura can do much explanatory work in Hobbes’s account of covenanting and citizenship as performances. The problem in Leviathan is that the reader is to see himself in a general man who reverses his comportment, from acting an enemy to acting as a covenantor. How can each convincingly perform his desire to be politically obligated to the other?’ In the play between natural and artificial person, Hobbes emphasizes the importance of perception, or being seen as. Castiligone’s concepts of grace and sprezzatura articulate the idea that a man can control his “being seen as”. Grace and sprezzatura are the double aspects of a performance when it has the desired effect on the spectator. “Hoby wrote that ‘the courtier ought to accompany all his doing, gestures, demeanours: finally all his motions with a grace.’”449 Sprezzatura has been most successfully translated as ‘nonchalance,’ however Hoby translates the term with ‘disgracing’ or ‘recklessness.’ These are not pejorative terms. Sprezzatura is “a term used ‘to show that what is done and said comes without effort and as if without thought.’”450 In tracing the Roman precursors of Castiglione’s teaching about performances, Burke argues that Cicero’s idea of the

447 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 120.
448 Castiglione, Hoby, and Henderson, The Book of the Courtier, 110. Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 46.
449 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier : The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, 68. Castiglione, Hoby, and Henderson, The Book of the Courtier, 33.
450 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier : The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, 30-31.

decorum of behavior, “the adaptation of social behavior, including posture and gesture, to circumstances and style of life, or “genus vitae” is a precursor idea to sprezzatura.451 In Burke’s interpretation of the commonality between the Roman idea of genus vitae and sprezzatura both imply the actor has self-control and self consciousness but these aspects of the performance remain unseen, because the overall effect of the performance on the spectator communicates facility and ease of action.452 Hoby translates the famous passage of the first book of the Courtier, which introduces the importance of disgracing or recklessness in performance. But I, imagining with my selfe often times how this grace commeth, leaving apart such as hav it from above, finde one rule that is most generall, which in this part (me thinke) taketh place in all things belonging to a man in word or deede, above all other. And that is to eschue as much as a man may, and as a sharpe and daungerous rocke, too much curiosenesse, and (to speake a new word) to use in everye thing a certaine disgracing to cover arte withall, and seeme whatsoever he doth and saith to doe it without paine, and (as it were) not minding it.453 Castiglione’s courtier lives by the rule of covering his art with art, or doing it “not minding it.” The courtier’s actions must seem as though they are easily done. Although a man must be self-consciousness in the sense of know what he is doing to achieve the appearance of grace, the action achieves grace to the extent that it is nonchalant. In my view, the moment of social covenant involves a play between the future subject-citizens’ appearing natural and appearing artificial. If we begin with the proposition that the covenantor in the state of nature is natural, his participation in the covenant requires that he appears artificial, or able to act as a citizen. If we argue that in the state of nature the man was artificial, because in acting the enemy he was not acting according to his conscience, then the covenanting moment requires that he act natural. In either

451 Ibid.,10-11.
452 Ibid., 69.
453 Castiglione, Hoby, and Henderson, The Book of the Courtier, 46.

case, the performance in covenanting evokes the themes of grace and sprezzatura because it entails both self-consciousness and a convincing performance. Adapting Castiglione’s conceptions of grace and disgracing to Leviathan’s covenanting moment, further illuminates Hobbes’s reliance on the conceit of theatrum mundi and comparison of covenantors to actors. The covenanting moment is both an ethical moment, dictated by the laws of nature, and it is the political moment par excellence because it constitutes the polity.454

Enacting natural law

Hobbes’s account of ethics means following the laws of nature. I argue these rules are followed not primarily as inner intentions of the will, but in and through performances. 455 Since Castiglione’s virtuous courtier and Hobbes’s natural law followers make their ethical status known by their performances, relying on theatricality in describing ethical behavior, each employs theatricality to abandon the aristocratic prejudice. It is a convincingly sincere and serious taking of an oath, or carrying out a role comprising the office of sovereignty rather than blood or birth defines a Hobbesian citizen. Whether or not a person is trustworthy enough to engage in a promise to politically oblige himself depends on the evaluation of his fellow covenantors. In Hobbes’s performative ethics, the correctness or rightness of the performance can only be judged by the effect it has for the spectators or auditors. Hobbes distinguishes his style of political philosophy by defining politics and ethics by the effect of citizen performances. Unlike the Republic, citizenship in the Leviathan is

454 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 9.
455 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis, 168. The basis of my disagreement with Strauss is that he does not take Hobbes’s attempt to overcome the rational will seriously, reading an account of an absolute distinction between right and wrong willing into the state of nature. Strauss does the idea of a philosophy where people are judged by the effect of their utterances and performances. Rather, he argues that only a political philosophy positing a transcendental rule to function as a standard of rationality can be a true political philosophy.

unrelated to the organization of a soul, and unlike modern philosophy citizenship for Hobbes does not require a theory of right intentions.

Leviathan’s ethics and politics: theatrical mimesis

Hobbes’s depiction of the covenantors in the foundational moment of the commonwealth involves the theatricality of being perceived as authors of the covenant. Since the relationship of actor and spectator presupposes a space of appearance, and since Hobbes aims to write in a way that turns his readers into spectators, the style and content of Leviathan are contextualized by the theatrum mundi. Hobbes acknowledges a modern character of sovereignty noting that it is comprised of many roles, such as judge, legislator and censor, enacted and spectated by citizens themselves. 456 The subject citizens engage in a mimetic dyanmic as they “avow” all that is done in their name by public officials, acting in roles comprising sovereignty.457 A judge, for example, exhibits political agency through obedience because he avows the judicial role through
his enaction or performance of this role. On the other side of the mimetic dynamic of avowal, the spectator counts as a political actor because he witnesses the judge’s performance. Each performance interprets a norm, and spectators may be able to judge both the norm affirmed and the performance. Since avowal and obedience are
perfomances entailing acting and spectatorship, Hobbes implies a public space exists.458 A consequence of attention to mimetic dynamics in the context of the civil state, is that the reduction of politics to obedience, can still be thought of as political action, because avowing sovereign acts involves the activity of carrying out official roles, and spectating others in roles comprising sovereignty.

456 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 126, 66.
457 Ibid., 124.
458 I am not arguing that Hobbes has a formula to create fair and equal opportunities to act in the roles of sovereignty, and there could be barriers to participation in acting or spectating.

Noticing the theatrical mimetic dynamic involved in citizenship opens up an interpretation of obedience or avowal as a political practice, one which mediates the alienation between subject-citizens and the authority they create. A citizen is an agent, despite his obedience, when he acts in a role comprising sovereignty or spectates others. As an actor, he has an opportunity to shape the normative consensus through his performance. Spectating citizens can judge and thereby influence the normative consensus arising out of performances of sovereignty. They can evaluate the norms and laws reinforced by the spectacle of sovereignty. Hobbesian citizens can be attributed both political and normative agency, because as spectators, they are able to judge sovereign acts. The mimetic dynamics involved in the citizens’ acting in official roles vis-à-vis other citizens’ perceiving them expresses the senses in which political agency still available to Hobbesian citizens in a way that can involve the contestation of laws and norms because specatators can turn critical. Extending the idea that theatricality means that obedience and avowal can have a participatory character, also means that their effects are contingent. In my view, the avowal of the sovereign is not necessarily endless because critical acting and spectatorship may be available to Hobbesian citizens. By critical spectatorship, I mean that a contestation of norms and laws may take place in and through social performances. The ethical agency Hobbes attributes to the citizen is first to follow the laws of nature or not, and second to interpret norms witnessed in others’ performances and put one’s own normative commitments on display in acting. Following the laws of nature constitutes an ethical moment because it represents the harmony of reason and passions affecting peace and it amounts to listening to one’s conscience. Self-consciousness comprises Hobbes’s ethical philosophy. Self-consciousness is also at play in political performances in so far as they achieve their intended effect. Hobbes’s
methodological statement, read thyself, suggests the development of self-consciousness is promised to the reader in following the text. He hopes that his text can lead his
readers to mutual accommodation as they reflect on his portrait of the general man. The reader may see himself in the general man, as he begins following the laws of nature. The laws of nature, in turn, specify a particular organization of the passions. Whether or not the text succeeds in developing the self-consciousness of the readers in the image of the general man’s recognition of the laws of nature depends on the interplay between Hobbes’s ability to turn his readers into spectators and the reader’s evaluations upon spectatorship. Whether or not the person described in Leviathan amounts to a subject of universal reason, is left up to the reader to decide. Similarly to the way in which the mimetic dynamic is a way of identifying the kind of agency available to the reader, the thearical mimetic dynamic between spectating and acting citizens is a relationship in which both sides of the mimetic dynamic retain and express agency in their acting and spectating, leaving open the possibility that the Hobbesian sovereign could be criticized by the very citizens who created it.

Ethics as Self-Consciousness

In the tradition, Leviathan is usually not interpreted to contain a robust ethical philosophy because the sovereign coerces the general men into natural law following out of fear of its punishment.459 Political obedience and compleasance, the virtues of citizenship, are not usually thought to involve responsibility because they are acts defined by their passivity. Compleasance means “accommodating oneself to the rest,” or

459 Manfred Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution : The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 60. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 93. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 308. 

social conformity, which is not an ethical virtue, because ‘right’ is usually not on the side of the conforming majority.460 In order to argue against the traditional reading, that in
Leviathan might makes right, Strauss recovers an ethical philosophy in the state of nature between right and wrong intentions.461 Hobbes explicitly states that natural law
comprises a moral philosophy, so ethical behavior would amount to following the laws of nature, and right intentions are those entailed by natural law following. In Frost’s
view, natural law following comprises an ethics, because subject-citizens retain a responsibility for reflecting on the effects their performances may have on others. Frost
acknowledges that the ethical relevance of natural law following entails attending to the same elements men are sensitive to in the context of mimetic desire, how they appear to others. The significance of such perceptions in determining people’s future patterns of anticipation, judgment, and action means that the effort to “Seek peace” requires individuals to be aware of how they are perceived by the others around them. The profound manner in which social interactions shape individuals generates the ethical mandate that individuals attend to their appearances. They must not merely be cognizant of and conceive themselves as objects of a public gaze, as people whose actions, gestures, and visible attitudes affect the propects for peace. They must also fashion and amend their appearances so that they are seen by others as well disposed towards
peace.462 I agree with Frost’s conclusion, that ethical behavior entails reflecting on how one’s performances affect others, concurring that Hobbes’s materialism explains perceptions, passions, reactions, and even some aspects of interactions. Frost’s account stands out,

460 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 106.
461 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis, 163, 68.
462 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 116.

because she locates ethical responsibility in Leviathan without imposing a view of right intention.463 On my reading unlike Frost’s, Hobbes’s ethics of reflection does not emerge from his materialist ontology alone. Instead, I regard Hobbes’s reliance on the idea of language as central to the arts and sciences to be influenced by Renaissance literature. The reason it is possible to read performative natural law following as ethical, is due to the general man’s ability to reflect on himself, or his self-consciousness of the way his acts may impinge on and viscerally affect others. On my reading Hobbes accounts for reflection or self-consciousness by drawing on Petrarch’s On my own ignorance and that of many others, and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Hobbes’s account of man’s reasoning process shifts from the mechanical materialist portrait of deliberation to a more reflective ratiocination in the course of the plot during the moment of recognition and reversal. A translation of what it means when the general man follows the laws of nature is that he has become self-consciousness of how others view him and has the know-how to perform towards the effect of mutual accommodation. Self-consciousness about whether or not others are adequately honoring him, involves the interpersonal psychological assimilation that fuels the problem of mimetic desire, derived from Republic Book III. Hobbes’s creates a methodological statement with nosce teipsum, in order to encourage his reader to reflect on the effect his performance has on others, and this also derives from Plato’s concern that men psychologically assimilate to the characters they read about. Positively valorizing the psychological assimilation that can occur with reading may have been derived from Petrarch, who argues that it is possible to reflect on oneself by reading about ethically

463 Ibid., 113.

corrupt others. In Leviathan, the general man becomes self-conscious when he recognizes the laws of nature in foro interno, and follows them into covenanting. In order to perform a covenant such that others also covenant requires the grace and disgracing found in the Book of the Courtier. Grace and disgracing as qualities of a performance mean both that the performer is self-conscious and that he conceals his self-consciousness. Hobbes’s emphasis on the idea that social relations are discordant or harmonious based on the way one is seen and judged according to his performances may have been borrowed from Castiglione, but in any case is related to an interpretation of theatrum mundi in which the theatre is a space of learning and negotiating norms. I agree with Frost that Hobbes has a mechanico-materialist approach to psychology, and that he attempts to surpass any extant view of the will. When it comes to articulating how citizens are to reflect on their performances, or identify with actors who act in the name of the commonwealth, however, I argue Hobbes is writing about the development of self-consciousness in a way that resonates with Plato, Petrarch, and Castiglione. As a consequence, I argue that the mechanical psychology overlaps with idea that men can change their knowledge, self-knowledge and ethical orientation. I concur with Frost as she explains that ethics in the Hobbesian commonwealth entails an ongoing dynamic between actors and spectators. The effects of performances “will shape what interlocutors actually perceive as reasonable, or what they can conceive as a rational course of action.”464 This ethical philosophy does not create rational criteria defining
peace and compleasance, instead, the ongoing dynamic between action and spectation determines the range of ethical action.

464 Ibid.

I conclude the Hobbesian commonwealth would in part consist in a contestation over norms waged through peformances. The sedimentation of values achieved by social
actors’s performances do not necessarily facilitate or preclude a given ethical standard. Hobbes may be arguing that social conformity brings peace and so constitutes ethical
behavior, but obviously, social bodies cannot rely on compleasance for ethical orientation, because that is tantamount to arguing that ethics lies with the majority. The self-consciousness or ethical quality of normative acts works over time to define peace and compleasance for a specific polity.

Kottman: materialism and the disavowal of the scene

Kottman’s reading of the relationship between Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan is almost opposite to mine. According to Kottman, the theoretical move carried out by Plato in the Republic between books three and ten, is a recognition and then effacement of the dramatic context of political life. Kottman attributes this same movement to Leviathan as well, without regard to the way in which Hobbes’s following of Petrarch, reverses the Platonic critique of mimesis, turning it into a positive textual strategy and an explanation for how bad men become good. In the context of the civil state, Hobbes aspires for a “politics without scene” and engages in “a radical disavowal
of the dramatic character of human life and interaction and, at the same time, vis-à-vis a
fundamental dependence upon a “dramatic” lexicon pressed into the service of this
disavowal.” 465

465 Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, 55.

Kottman argues that political representation in the context of the civil state, what I term the process of mimetic identification involved in the relationships of personation triangulating the sovereign, person of state, and subject citizen, is the way in which Hobbes attempts to disavow a performative politics. Kottman argues that the mimetic identifications involved in political representation are fundamentally antidramatic. 466 What Hobbes has in common with Plato, is an expulsion of the “broad horizon of dramatic representation.” 467 Leviathan “disavows dramatic representation in favor of sovereign unity and power.”468 Kottman sets up a disjunct between a politics
informed by theatrum mundi, which involves “an interactive horizon of words and deeds among unique actors and witnesses” and a Hobbesian politics.469 Kottman’s analysis of Hobbes’s mechanico-materialism concludes that Leviathan depoliticizes, because “the very unpredictability of words and deeds in their potentiality, or futurity, is sacrificed to the universal law of motion.”470 He writes, in the Hobbesian state of nature “there is apparently no exchange of words and deeds that would be distinct from the sheer violent conflict that results from the movement of bodies and the motion of limbs.”471 Kottman attributes the development of the state of nature to “a law of bodily motion,” an “aggressive and violent trajectory.” All human behavior, according to this account of Hobbes’s materialist ontology, is nondramatic and apolitical. Frost attends to Hobbes’s mechanico materialist psychology, correcting Kottman’s argument that the state of nature lacks interpersonal scenes. According to [Hobbes’s] materialism, a subject’s sense of self, and his or her patterns of desire and thinking, are not ever wholly his or her own. They are not autogenetic, autnomic phenomena. Rather, individuals’ subjective self-identity, their thoughts, and their desires are constituted and modified by

466 Ibid.,Ibid., 4.
467 Ibid.
468 Ibid., 5.
469 Ibid., 7. The difference between my view and Kottman’s, is that he argues that what Hobbes has done is not possible, that a mechanico-materialist ontology is irreconcilable with a philosophical anthropology which draws on theatrum mundi and theatricality.
470 Ibid., 63.
471 Ibid., 62.

their ongoing encounter and engagment with one another and with the world.472 Far from atoms in motion bouncing off of one another, the general men in the state of
nature develop their sense of themselves and their place in the social hierarchy through encounters with one another, which is how aspects of the world become meaningful.
Frost emphasizes that social relations between men mediate, contextualize, and direct their passions and desires so that the state of nature cannot be explained by the
mechanico-materialist aspects of perception, without also taking into consideration the way men’s gestures of honor and dishonor affect one another. “As Hobbes’s elaboration of the determination of desires and the imagination stipulates, the relations between Hobbesian subjects are visceral, relentless, and fundamental to their sense of who they are, what they imagine is possible, and what they want.”473 Kottman misses the interactive scene of the state of nature, the aspect I term the problem of mimetic desire, and Frost articulates as intersubjective encounters. In place of a description of the problem of mimetic desire, Frost writes, “each individual’s patterns of thinking and
desire are shaped to a great extent by the intentions and aims he or she perceives in other individuals’ actions, gestures, and visible attitudes in the course of interaction.”474
In my view, Frost has identified mimesis as an aspect of interpersonal behavior, but attempts to include it in her analysis of Hobbes’s materialism, whereas I argue that it is
a different process than that which Hobbes describes when he uses explicitly mechanico-materialist language. In contrast to Kottman, I have argued the problem of mimetic
desire means that the state of nature is characterized by an asocial sociality, replete with gestures of honor and dishonor.

472 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 113.
473 Ibid.
474 Ibid., 116.

Unlike Kottman or Frost, my reading does not derive the psychology of the general man entirely from the materialist ontology of matter in motion. Rather, I focus on Hobbes’s philosophical anthropology, or the problem of mimetic desire, because it contextualizes the mechanico-materialist psychology. What a man desires is not solely based on his empirical experience with the desired object. Where that object stands in terms of its effect on his place in a social hierarchy determines his desire for it as well. This means that signs of honor and dishonor cannot be totally reduced to the mechanico-materialist psychology, but also depend on the social and historical horizon of the
general man’s ratiocination. The mechanico-materialist psychology is also not comprehensive when it comes to the covenanting moment because Leviathan depicts meaningful communication in the covenanting moment, which is about authenticating oral performances as much as it is about fear. Again in this scene, the mechanico-materialist  psychology is mediated by a play of perspectives, dramatic performances of words and gestures directed to and by rivals becoming fellow citizens. Kottman argues that the process of mimetic identifications, or subject-citizens’ avowals of the acts of the sovereign eliminate the possibility of performances which express singularity rather than generic individuality.475 Citizen performances are not revelatory of a person’s singularity, because in acting, each acts a part that is identical to the parts played by every other citizen. As a result, when a citizen is acting as an artificial person, as a judge for example, according to Kottman, he is not doing anything that “could not be performed or carried out by another.”476 Kottman acknowledges Hobbes’s debt to the performative dimension of personhood articulated by Machiavelli and Castiglione, but argues that once the system of mimetic identification and avowal

475 Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, 67.
476 Ibid., 70.

sets in, after the sovereign is authorized, grace and sprezzatura would no longer be possible. According to Kottman’s reading, Renaissance self-fashioning comes to an end
with citizenship. On my reading, Hobbes’s Leviathan does not preclude the possibility of a theatrical politics. Perception entails spatial dynamics, and as a result, the mimetic
identifications that Hobbes places at the center of his account of sovereign representation can be disturbed by the theatrical mimesis of citizenship. This means that the psychological assimilation of the citizen to all acts of sovereignty can be rendered contingent through critical spectatorship. On my reading, covenanting and citizenship involve acting and spectatorship preserving a sense of scene. In Leviathan, sovereignty can be thought of as an office, carried out by a variety of actors who personate the commonwealth by acting in official roles.477

Politics as mediating alienation

In terming sovereignty a spectacle and relying on perspective Hobbes presupposes political space, the space in which citizens observe and avow one another’s acts. On my reading, the office of sovereignty is carried out by many actors, playing a number of roles, such as judge, legislator, and voter. The office of sovereignty is carried out by subject-citizens themselves, acting in official roles. As a result, the spectacle of sovereignty on the quotidian level is not awesome, but comprised of many smaller performances. Hobbes’s emphasis on avowal means that when other citizens look on performances of officials, each imagines that he himself has authored the act, by
identifying with the actor, or psychologically assimilating oneself into the performance.477 In turning sovereignty into an abstract office, Hobbes anticipates the bureaucratic state. This however, is only the consequence in accordance with the absolutist ambitions of Leviathan. When citizenship entails performances, obedience turns out to not
necessarily entail passivity. I argue that each citizen’s performance in acting as an executor of the office of sovereignty, can render mimetic identifications with the sovereign, contingent. Leviathan’s subject citizens will be forced to abide by the laws of nature and the civil laws, but in and through their performances of rule following, the meaning of norms and laws may shift in response to citizens’ performances. Due to the possibility of creating a theatrical space in and through acting and spectatorship, citizens can be attributed responsibility for the norms and laws of their polity. The kind of responsibility involved, however, does not rely on the concept of the will as the personal locus of ethical and political responsibility. Instead, citizens are responsible for their interpretations of norms and laws which they express in acting and spectatorship. I argue that a space of politics exists in the Hobbesian commonwealth because citizens reinterpret the meanings of norms, law, and office holding in and through their activities as actors and spectators. A space of politics is implied by Hobbes’s reliance on perspective in establishing his vision of sovereign representation. In my view, the process of mimetic identification or psychological assimilation in which the spectator sees, appreciates, or interprets the actor’s performance cannot be controlled by a center of power. The sovereign cannot dictate the effect that performances of acting in the name of the commonwealth will have on perceiving subject citizens. The aspect of the actor’s performance psychologically assimilated by the spectator could differ from the intentions of the performer. The spectatorship central to mimetic identification with
sovereign acts could be critical. On my reading, a pacified social body or political contestation could be the outcome of the sovereign’s attempt to secure its authority. I conclude that Hobbes’s conception of politics amounts to a politics of action and spectatorship, even if his authorial intention is to establish a pacified social body. In my view, the triangle of mimetic identifications involved in Hobbes’s explanation of the covenant as the authorization of sovereignty, can be rendered contingent through the theatrical mimesis on which sovereignty ultimately depends. Citizens acting as an artifical persons, for example as a parliamentarian, ought to aspire to the performative standards of grace and sprezzatura. These qualities are present when spectators perceive an actor the way he wants to be seen. In order to take some responsibility for the direction of their commonwealth, citizens ought to be concerned with the political and ethical norms expressed in or reaffirmed by their performances and spectatorship. Although Hobbes argues each ought to avow all the actions they have authored, these acts are performed, perceived, and evaluated. The mimetic identifications entailed in the authorization of the sovereign amounts to Hobbes’s approach to reconfiguring the problem of mimetic desire. Nevertheless, sovereign acts carried out by citizens cannot necessarily be devoid of their dramatic dimension. While Hobbes argues citizen performances ought to create political unity, this unity is not secured in a permanent way, due to the constitutive power still available to citizens with the theatrical dimension of mimesis.

Kottman argues that in the state of nature, citizens are particular instances of a universal man. In other words, he claims Hobbesian citizens are replaceable because the
offices of sovereignty are abstract and can be held by different people over time. I would argue that no two performances are exactly alike, especially when they achieve the
quality of grace and sprezzatura. Unlike Kottman, I argue that the carrying out of the duties of a political office is theatrical, so that while Hobbesian politics for Kottman has
no scene, in my interpretation it does. I agree with Kottman that a politics of scene and performance means that actors can disclose their singularity in unpredictable acts
creating contingency in the organization of the polity itself.478 Every performance of following a law is an interpretation informing others’ understanding of the variety of
performances that can count as following that law. Sameness– of performances or individuals, is precluded by the fact that each man sees what political obligation means
from his own corner, or perspective. After the collapse of the ontological hierarchy between real and appearing worlds, to conceive of the world as a stage, as a series of appearances, lost its pejorative ring, because there is no standard of real, which the appearing fails to achieve. William West traces the change in the meaning of theatrum mundi in the Renaissance, suggesting that after the collapse of the ontological hierarchy between real and appearing worlds, the metaphor came to indicate a “theory of knowing that treated knowledge as a process of making or enacting.”479 This view of ethics coheres with Hobbes’s use of the imitative arts to explain a kind of political know-how that could replace Aristotelian prudence. It also coheres with Castiglione and English courtesy books which stress that how one ought to behave is relative to the context of performance. In my view Hobbesian citizenship entails a “knowing how and when to perform” in following the laws and discharging obligations. West argues that there is an ethic that corresponds to the modern conceit of theatrum mundi, an injunction to “behave…in accord with mere appearances.”480 Hobbes changes the direction of spectation from one another to the sovereign in order to solve the problem of mimetic desire. Citizens behold one another’s

478 Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, 64.
479 West, “Knowledge and Performance in the Early Modern Theatrum Mundi.”
480 Ibid.

official performances, possibly critically. Each calibrates his sense of normative behavior towards others as he learns from perceiving and judging others. Following the law
means what it appears to mean as determined by social interaction and ongoing consensus forming. West writes, “both knowledge and self-knowledge arise in the gap
between specator and actor; clarity is gained by giving up performing and taking up looking on.”481 The Hobbesian commonwealth, on this reading, retains a political space, because the play of perspective between actors and spectators implies a bounded space between them. Political contestation would reside in the ability of different
performances to gradually change the meaning of the acceptable range of actions that could count as norm and law following. Since civil life is comprised by spectatorship
and acting, there is no way to secure the rigidity of law and normative conformity we associate with Leviathan’s absolutist ambitions.

The ends of the commonwealth

My reading of the grace and sprezzatura definitive of ethical and political performances in Leviathan differs from Frost’s account of a Hobbesian ethics because I find natural law following to only contingently comprise an ethical way of life. The laws of nature dictate passionate states as much as they articulate rules of conduct. For example natural law following men lack anger, they desire to forgive instead of revenge, and fear the consequences of law breaking.482 These passions which facilitate compleasance are only contingently ethically right. In certain situations, they can be unethical modes of comportment. Kahn has interpreted Hobbes’s emphasis on the role of the passions in ethical behavior to mean “the passions function as a vehicle of

481 Ibid.

482 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, Ch. 15.

Foucauldian discipline.”483 I concur the law of nature dictating compleasance, or that men ought to accommodate themselves to the rest, coheres with the phenomenon
Foucault terms normalization. The sovereign has to give law to a normalized social body. If we interpret ethical action to consist in grace and sprezzatura, and assume that actors are capable of virtuosic performances, there remains the question of what kind of normalized society all of these performances sediment into. In other words, the laws of nature appear as a genuine ethics when they are cast as contingent performances for which actors and spectators are responsible. However, when the laws of nature are
examined as a condition of the plot moving towards the imposition of law, then the social body appears passive and conforming upon following the laws of nature. Since Hobbes defines ethics by the effect of a performance, he pushes the meaning of compleasance and peace continually into the future. In my view, these terms are too vague to constitute a strong ethical philosophy for the citizens of the Hobbessian commonwealth, which in turn presents an opportunity for citizen actors and specatators to reciprocally define their obligations over time. In my view, actors in the Hobbesian commonwealth are responsible for their performances and interpretations of others, but
cannot fully control the meaning of their own public performances. While the mimetic dynamics between citizens are the locus of citizen responsibility for the polity, this
responsibility cannot be located with an individual will. The dominant normative and legal situation of a commonwealth is the product of a series of mimetic dynamics, for
which each citizen is only partly responsible.

483 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, 2nd Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory.”

By characterizing politics and ethics as mimetic, as taking place between actors and spectators, the effect of politics cannot be foreseen. If citizens avow the series of mimetic identifications without critical spectatorship, an authoritarian polity would result. If actors stretch the boundaries of their roles and citizens engage, a robust space of politics could be maintained. In relying on perspective, Hobbes implies a political space, in which citizens could perform for one another what it means that the sovereign secures life. In the dedicatory epistle, Hobbes relates to Sidney Godolphin his attempt to navigate between too much liberty and too much authority in imagining a commonwealth.484 By relying on mimesis, Hobbes has left it up to the performances and spectatorship of the subject citizens to enact the balance between liberty and authority in their commonwealth. The mimetic politics of Leviathan is expresses the new connotation of theatrum mundi that West identifies as creating the break between the Renaissance valorization of theater and previous philosophical disparagements of theatricality. The theatrical mimetic dynamics of theatricality show how men have agency in creating the norms which become the normative consensus enforced by law, and agency to create mutual political obligations. Hobbes’s reliance on mimesis results in an ambivalent politics, in which the degree of authoritarianism depends on subject-citizen performances and critical spectatorship. Attention to theatrical mimetic dynamics reveals that following Leviathan’s account of citizenship does not certainly result in an absolutist, authoritarian polity. While Hobbes’s boldest hope is that the modern state as a political authority could eliminate the contingency of its own order, the role of mimesis demonstrates that the authority of any order is always subject to the historically dependent theater of the polity.

484 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 3.