Introduction to Mimesis in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan

Well that was the old layout in a draft I had printed, but it wasn’t the last draft by far.  

Then I found something labeled final draft from 2010 in my email tonight.  I’m still unable to access a real library but may get to one this week.

Mimesis in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651): The Theatre of the Modern Commonwealth

Introduction

Gabriel Harvey’s account of the mechanics of the human body inspired Thomas Hobbes to embark on a three-part project, De Corpore, (Of Bodies), De Homine (Of Man) and De Cive (On the Citizen).1 This dissertation is about Leviathan, the text he wrote instead of strictly following his original three-part plan. Leviathan is a member of a trilogy of its own, with the Elements of Law and On the Citizen widely considered to be its rough drafts.2 Leviathan is one of the most important texts in the history of political thought because it is an early account of the formation of a polity through a social covenant. Hobbes’s argument for equality under the law gives the text a proto-liberal tone, but the truly modern character of Leviathan, in my view, arises from Hobbes’s omission of the aristocratic prejudice prevalent in classical political thought. In giving an account of the state of nature, Hobbes draws attention to the instability of natural hierarchies, noting men are equal due to the equal ability to kill one another.3 When he outlines the
covenanting moment, he does not create citizenship requirements relating to economic or social status.4 Hobbes’s Leviathan is unprecedented in its focus on the constitutive power of the people, and the idea that the future subject-citizens are also the founders of the commonwealth.5

1
William Sacksteder, “Three Diverse Sciences in Hobbes: First Philosophy, Geometry, and Physics, “The Review of Metaphysics 45, no. 4 (1992): 739.
² Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3, 10. Hobbes revised Leviathan, while translating it from English to Latin, yet it is the English version that has captured the attention of interpreters.
³ Thomas Hobbes and Richard Tuck, Leviathan, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 108.
⁴ Ibid., Chapter 18.
⁵ Ibid., 10.

Hobbes’s departure from the aristocratic prejudice of classical political thought Polybius’s Histories clearly presents the rationale for the dominance of the aristocratic prejudice from which Hobbes departs. Polybius’s cycle of constitutions justifies the aristocratic prejudice on the basis of an account of political change over time.6 This cycle begins with a despot, a strong man who arises out of the state of nature, or a just king whose authority is naturally respected on account of his extraordinary
wisdom and justice.7 Kingship descends into tyranny, which is overthrown by good men who inaugurate aristocratic rule.8 Aristocratic rule degenerates into oligarchy, overthrown by good men creating democratic rule.9 The problem is that democratic rule degenerates into anarchy, and this is the end of the constitution.10 In Polybius’s model, aristocracy can be thought of as safer than democracy because it is farther away in time from the descent into anarchy. The cycle of constitution moves from order to disorder. Hobbes’s Leviathan reverses this historical trajectory. For the first time in the history of political thought, an author accounts for a transition from anarchic disorder to political order. Hobbes does not rely on either a man who becomes king on account of his wisdom and justice, or a despot who becomes a ruler simply because he is the strongest, in order to explain the transition out of the state of nature.11 Hobbes’s Leviathan departs from extant accounts of founding because he describes the constitutive power of the multitude to make itself into a people out of a natural degenerates into oligarchy, overthrown by good men creating democratic rule.9 The problem is that democratic rule degenerates into anarchy, and this is the end of the constitution.10

6
Polybius, Fridericus Hultsch, and Evelyn S. Shuckburgh, The Histories of Polybius, Indiana
University Greek and Latin Classics (Bloomington,: Indiana University Press, 1962), 302-3.
⁷ Ibid., 304.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Ibid., 307-8.
¹⁰ Ibid., 309.
¹¹ Ibid., 304; Marcus Tullius Cicero et al., “De Inventione,” in De Inventione. De Optimo Genere
Oratorum. Topica (London, Cambridge,: Heinemann; Harvard University Press, 1968), 4-6.

Cicero’s De Inventione argues that a wise man arrives on the scene to create political order. Hobbes departs from classical political thinking because he does
not argue political knowledge and power are relevant only for a king or aristocratic class, rather he accounts for the power and knowledge required for constitution as belonging to every future subject-citizen.

Leviathan’s constitutive power

Hobbes announces that the multitude exerts constitutive power in the opening pages of Leviathan, leaving the reader eager to discover ‘how’? Plato’s Republic does not answer the question of how the multitude can construct a polity concluding that not even philosophers could successfully harness power and knowledge.12 Aristotle, by contrast, carves out a relationship between political knowledge and power in his concepts of prudence and praxis with prudence as the kind of knowledge corresponding to his view of political action, or praxis.13 Hobbes could not adopt the Aristotle’s ideas of prudence and praxis in order to explain the political knowledge and power the multitude
exerts in constituting itself, because he attempted to adopt views of power and knowledge from the new mechanical sciences for his account of constitution.14 The new mechanical sciences were a burgeoning field of knowledge concerning mechanical power.15 The methods of the new sciences presented alternatives to the scholastic approach to philosophy, which Hobbes criticized for their practice of beginning syllogisms through reference to a commonplace, or a passage from an Aristotelian

12
Plato, The Republic, ed. GRF Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 476b-c, 92a-b,95b, 503d.
¹³ Aristotle and Terence Irwin, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., 1999), 1140-45, 47a.
¹⁴ Thomas A. Spragens, The Politics of Motion; the World of Thomas Hobbes ([Lexington]: University Press of Kentucky, 1973). John W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas (Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vt., USA: Gower, 1989). Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
¹⁵ Paolo Rossi and Benjamin Nelson, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, [1st ] ed., Harper Torchbooks ; Tb 1458 (New York,: Harper & Row, 1970).

text.16 In addition to his disapproval of scholastic Aristotelian methods, Hobbes also may have understood the collapse of the Aristotelian cosmos as a result of Galileo’s geometrization of space.17 Hobbes also adopted nominalism, rejecting Aristotle’s views of reality and language.18 In order to account for the multitude’s ability to construct the polity out of an anarchic state of nature, Hobbes needs a new account of political know-how, and turns away from the terms dominating at the time, prudence and praxis.
This dissertation argues that the central question of Leviathan is the know-how future-subject citizens employ to construct the political authority under which they live. Hobbes opens the Leviathan by likening man’s creation of the commonwealth to God’s creation of nature. He writes: “Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governs the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal.” 19 This opening line lauds the creative powers of mankind by comparing political activity to the awesome generative powers of God. Hobbes is the first to argue the state is artificial, a construction of the subject-citizens who are to obey the political authority they create. Despite the prevalence of metaphors Hobbes draws from the new mechanical sciences, I argue that Hobbes relies on mimesis to solve the problem of know-how because it illuminates how citizens construct the commonwealth. In other words, mimesis expresses the power and knowledge through which future subject-citizens are

16 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 34.
17 Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Publications of the Institute of the History of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins University. 3d Ser.: The Hideyo Noguchi Lectures, V. 7 (Baltimore,: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957). William Sacksteder, “Hobbes: Geometrical Objects,” Philosophy of Science 48, no. 4 (1981).
18 Noel Malcolm, “Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology” (PhD Dissertation, Cambridge, 1982). 19 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 9. By “artificial animal” Hobbes means a sovereign, the sine qua non of the commonwealth. This line is also an allusion to Plato’s Timaeus. Plato and R. D. Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of Plato, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (New York,: Arno Press, 1973), 38a, 39e, 41e, 42e, 44d, 48e, 51b,, 69c, 88d.

responsible for the creation of the specifically political world, or commonwealth. Mimesis, or ‘imitation’ in Latin, is a term discussed in Plato’s Timeaus, Republic, Laws, and Sophist, and its meaning touches on themes found in many other dialogues as well.20 Aristotle employs mimesis in the Poetics.21 Quintilian and Cicero address mimesis in their rhetorical guidebooks.22 Mimesis is a multi-faceted idea Hobbes adapts from classical texts, to put to use for a completely modern account of how a polity can be
constituted.

Theatrical mimesis and the social covenant

Hobbes promises to answer the question, “how can a multitude transition from the state of nature to the civil state? I will argue Hobbes uses the power/knowledge integral to the several dimensions of mimesis to solve this problem. The social covenant is usually conceived of as the means Hobbes uses to explain the transition from the state of nature to the civil state. I will show that theatrical mimesis is at the center of Hobbes’s vocabulary choice of ‘personation’ or mask wearing to describe the way covenantors appear to one another. In chapter sixteen, Hobbes accounts for the covenanting moment by defining the meanings of personation. In so doing, he explicitly compares covenantors to actors.

The word Person is latine: instead whereof the Greeks have prosopon, which signifies the Face, as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters.23

20 Plato, The Republic, Chapter 3, 10. ———, Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. , 1993), 236b9-c1. Plato and Donald J. Zeyl, Gorgias (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1987), 448b, 502b, 03e. Plato, Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), Chapter 2, 9.858.
21 Aristotle, Seth Benardete, and Michael Davis, Aristotle on Poetics (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), 47a16, 53b12, 60b8.
22 Cicero et al., “De Inventione,” 4, 6. Quintilian and Harold Edgeworth Butler, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 16-22.

I argue that Hobbes turns to theatrical mimesis in depicting the covenanting moment because he is discussing men’s change in roles, from rivals or enemies in the state of nature, to fellow subject-citizens in the covenanting moment. Men have to wear a very different masks vis-à-vis one another in these two different situations. These two masks express different ethics or approaches to interpersonal relationships from the desire to dominate expressed in the adage of the man pursuing natural right, recipe finem, to participation in reciprocal relations characteristic of the natural law follower.24 The theatricality of covenanting implies that the covenant takes place as though on a stage,
inaugurating the historical ‘stage’ of the commonwealth. This depiction of covenantors as mask-wearers invokes the philosophical and literary conceit of theatrum mundi, or “all the world’s a stage.”25 In the context of Renaissance England, and in the history of Western philosophy, theatrum mundi or “all the world’s a stage,” expresses the sense in which men think of themselves as role players, and the world they inhabit, a stage.26 Hobbes especially invokes this conceit when he implies that being natural or artificial amounts to being seen as representing oneself or another.27 The ascription of natural or artificial personhood is in the eye of the beholder.28 The theatrical mimesis crucial for the execution of the covenant involves the mutual being seen as capable of taking on the political obligations comprising citizenship.

²³ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 112.
²⁴ Ibid., 21, 111.
²⁵ William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), Scene VII, 140, Jacques.
²⁶ William N. West, “Knowledge and Performance in the Early Modern Theatrum Mundi,” in Dimensions of the Early Modern Theatrum Metaphor: Order and Representation of Knowledge, ed. Oswald Bauer Flemming Shock, and Ariane Koller (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2008), 2. Minos M Kokolakis, The Dramatic Similie of Life (Athens, Greece1960), 77.
²⁷ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 112.
²⁸ Hanna Pitkin, “Hobbes’s Concept of Representation–I,” The American Political Science Review 58, no. 2 (1964): 334. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 198. Neither Pitkin nor Skinner comes to the conclusion I do, because they do not center theatrum mundi as a guide to reading the covenanting moment.

Hobbes emphasizes that the constitution of a new commonwealth takes place in the appearing world, and the mutual appearance of covenantors is its condition. Hobbes is the right thinker to turn to when exploring mimesis as the modern analogue to ancient prudence and praxis, because Hobbes radically revalues mimesis against Plato’s critique of mimesis in the Republic. Plato’s critique of mimesis in the Republic and Hobbes’s revaluation of mimesis
In book ten, Socrates presents the simile of the divided line, which establishes Plato’s ontological hierarchy and the idea that the appearing world partakes less in reality than the real world. For many classical thinkers adopting this ontological hierarchy, theatrum mundi was a lament about the distance between the appearing and real worlds.29 The distinction between natural and artificial mapped onto the classical ontological hierarchy between real and appearing worlds. This hierarchy is often accompanied by a critique of theatricality understood through the history of valuing the natural over the artificial. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait introduce the terms theatricality and theatrum mundi in the discipline of theatre studies. “Theatricality has been identified with both the Greek idea of mimesis and the Latin idea of theatrum mundi.”30 Davis and Postlewait explain how Plato’s ontological hierarchy has informed many value comparisons, with terms associated with theatricality typically devalued.

29
West, “Knowledge and Performance in the Early Modern Theatrum Mundi,” 2. Kokolakis, The Dramatic Similie of Life, 77.
³⁰ Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, “Introduction,” in Theatricality (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.

this is a long quote 

The familiar distinction between nature and artifice has a long history in aesthetics, and it continues to guide various people who write about both the history of theatre and the theory of theatricality. Almost invariably, the polarity between the natural (or the real) and the theatrical (or the artificial) carries a moral as well as an aesthetic judgment, with the idea of the natural serving, of course, as the positive pole in the equation. The natural is also the realm of the sincere and the true, especially with the emergence of romanticism. In philosophical terms, this opposition illustrates the dichotomy between appearance and reality. Thus, a series of related antinomies are in operation here: real versus false, genuine versus fake, intrinsic versus extrinsic, original versus imitative, true versus counterfeit, honest versus dishonest, sincere versus devious, accurate versus distorted, revealed versus disguised, face versus mask, serious versus playful, and essential versus artificial. All things theatrical are on the negative end of the polarity.31

Since Hobbes invokes theatrum mundi as the solution to the problem of founding, it is clear that Hobbes revalues this conceit. Plato eschews the idea that identity is role-play because it pluralizes character, and for Plato men ought to have the kind of character that is a single whole.32 Hobbes’s revaluation of mimesis is not surprising considering Galileo’s geometrization of space had made space measurable in a way that suggested it was infinite and without ontological hierarchy.33 As the classical worldviews became less tenable, so did the Platonic view of the soul. The Hobbesian man has a malleable character, evident in the way Leviathan traces a change in his ethical orientation, from an aristocratic warrior in the state of nature to a character who abides by the laws of nature and acts capable of assuming political obligations in the covenanting moment.34 Hobbes’s decision to show ethical becoming belies a view of ethics that approaches the question of the polity and citizenship in a different way than Plato does. Hobbes follows other Renaissance thinkers such as Baldesaar Castiglione in revaluing the malleability of character as important rather than detrimental to virtue. 

³¹ Ibid., 5.
³² Plato, The Republic, 397d-e.
³³ Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, viii. Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 43-44.
³⁴ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, Chapter X, p.112.

Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier teaches its readers how to act or role-play in a way that will be well received by others, or count as virtue in court.35 According to William West, theatrum mundi was widely revalued during the Renaissance, placing Hobbes’s revaluation of mimesis in its wider cultural context.  

our usual understanding of the theater as necessarily divided between a true substance and a false seeming does not necessarily apply to early modern uses of the theater metaphor as a characterization of the process of knowing. Rather, the theater metaphor suggests that knowledge is neither a mere reflection of what is known nor a complete fabrication, but a kind of performance or enactment. The understanding of knowledge as performance allows us to distinguish a theory of knowing that is peculiar to the early modern period, and perhaps that can serve to characterize that period against what comes before it.36  

West articulates the new valorization of theatricality that accompanied a new insight that performance requires and reflects a certain kind of knowing, and that theater facilitates knowledge. Hobbes turns his readers into spectators, showing the reader the performances of the general man. I will argue that the knowledge involved in constitutive power of the future subject citizens in creating the authority under which they live, is exactly the kind of knowledge required for, and expressed in the performance that founds the commonwealth. In order to show how thorough-going Hobbes’s reversal of mimesis against Plato is, I will present the anthropological and poetic dimensions of mimesis which form the basis of the Republic’s crtitique of mimesis in Book III, and show how revalues mimetic dynamics. Plato’s critique of mimesis in Book X of the Republic is preceded by a discussion of the anthropological and poetic dimensions of mimesis in Book III. Interlocutors are primarily concerned with identifying the ideal cultivation of youth through education.37

35
Baldassarre Castiglione, Thomas Hoby, and Walter Brooks Drayton Henderson, The Book of the Courtier, Everyman’s Library, No. 807 (London, New York,: J.M. Dent & sons; E.P. Dutton & co., 1928), 33.
³⁶ West, “Knowledge and Performance in the Early Modern Theatrum Mundi,” 1.
³⁷ Plato, The Republic, 376d-92d.

Socrates and Adeimantus pursue the anthropological dimension of mimesis, or the human tendency to imitate others in a natural learning process. The interlocutors agree that “making yourself resemble someone else—either in the way you speak or the way you look” is “imitating the person you make yourself resemble.”³⁸ Socrates and Adeimantus observe that in a natural condition, youth will imitate one another or characters they hear about in auditing epics. The anthropological dimension
of mimesis refers to imitation as part of the natural learning process through imitation. For Plato, the anthropological mimetic tendency is often harnessed by poetry, in other words, the reader or auditor of a story is apt to imitate the characters portrayed in a story. The poetic dimension of mimesis refers to the dramatic form of a myth, epic, or tragedy. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics both define the poetic dimension of mimesis as plot, story, or drama as they examine dynamics between author or speaker and reader or auditor. 39 The poetic dimension of mimesis is evident in Leviathan, as Hobbes made countless rhetorical decisions, which cumulatively characterize his style.40 Just as Plato and Aristotle recognize a dynamic between author and auditor or reader, Hobbes opens Leviathan by directly characterizing this relationship
as one of teacher and student. He argues his text will have an effect on the reader, it will show him everything he needs to know to govern.41 In Leviathan, Hobbes introduces his text by reference to the poetic dimension of mimesis and its ability to evoke natural imitation as he asks the reader, nosce teipsum, read thyself.

³⁸ Ibid., 393c.
³⁹ Ibid., 394c. Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 1447a10-15. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 73. Goran Sörbom, Mimesis and Art (Uppsala, Sweden: Appelbergs Boktryckeri 1966), 99.
⁴⁰ James R. Martel, Subverting the Leviathan : Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Raia Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’s Leviathan (New York Garland 1991). Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.
⁴¹ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 11.

But there is another saying not of late understood, by which they might learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is, Nosce teipsum, Read thy self: to teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions.42

Hobbes employs the poetic dimension of mimesis to describe the didactic value of his text. The promise of reading the text is to see oneself and by extension, understand others. Through the achievement of self-knowledge, the reader becomes fit to govern because in knowing about himself, he also knows about others.

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind: which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also find not the same in himself.⁴³

Hobbes makes two related claims about how poetic mimesis, or the style of the text will affect its readers. It is not the idea that the text will have the same effect on everyone, but the idea that the text can move the knowledge, self-knowledge, and ethical orientation of its reader. The effect cannot be the same, because Hobbes does not claim that men are mirror images of one another, but that the workings of the passions in one man is similar to the workings of passions in another. According to the mechanico-materialist view of the human body Hobbes adapted from Harvey, sense experience provokes “interiour motions,” for example the blood can move quickly or slowly,
depending on if it is hot or cold.44

42
Ibid., 10.

43
Ibid., 11.

44
Ibid., 37.

Hobbes implies that everyone’s blood moves mechanically through his body according to the same principles, even as he acknowledges that men’s bodies can be sensitive to external stimuli in radically different ways.45 Leviathan promises to show the reader the grounds of the passions of mankind or how the passions move in principle, even while he recognizes the singularity of individual responses to empirical stimuli. While Hobbes’s invitation to the reader, nosce tiepsum, argues that reading oneself in another
constitutes a learning process that results in political knowledge, Plato’s critique of mimesis in Book III of the Republic, is based on a very similar argument. Poetry presents vivid portraits of characters that incite youth to imitate them in the course of a natural learning process. Adeimantus and Socrates agree that children imitate models, which can be actual persons or characters in texts, and that the practice of imitation has an effect on their ethical disposition.46 Poetry represents a threat to the education of the guardian due to the variety of character models in whose portraits the youthful auditors may see themselves and attempt to imitate.47 The variety of characters to which a reader or auditor is exposed, leads to an instability in his ability to maintain a unified and stable character or role in the polis. The question, ‘what are the appropriate models for the future guardians to imitate, given that imitation is a natural feature of behavior?’ is answered, “if they do imitate anything, then from their earliest childhood they should choose appropriate models to imitate—people who are brave, self-disciplined, god-fearing, free, that sort of thing. …Have you ever noticed how imitation, if long continued from an early age, becomes part of a person’s nature, turns into habits of body, speech and mind?’”⁴⁸

⁴⁵ Ibid., 31, 38, 39.
⁴⁶ Plato, The Republic, 388b, 90d, 93c.
⁴⁷ Ibid., 393d-95.
⁴⁸ Ibid., 395c-d.

The only poetic style suitable for the Republic is the “pure imitator of the good man,” because “our men do not have a dual or manifold nature, since each of them performs only one task.”⁴⁹ Leviathan begins on the opposite note, inviting its readers to imitate the general man depicted in the text. There are two different critiques of mimesis in the Republic, in Book III and in Book X. In Book X, the critique of mimesis is based on the ontological hierarchy Plato establishes with the simile of the divided line. Since the theatricality of man’s role-playing takes place in the appearing world, it partakes in a lesser degree of reality than the form of the good. Theatricality is not a means to achieve the ethical good for Plato due to this ontological hierarchy. The problematic character role-playing has for the soul has a basis in Book X and is also explicitly outlined in Book III’s critique of mimesis. In Book III, the critique of mimesis is based on the instability of the soul created by natural imitation provoked by poetry. 50 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-play invites a powerful psychological effect on his soul. Taking on the persona of a character results in a “’self-likening’” or psychological assimilation,” which “shapes the disposition of the agent.”⁵¹ Plato draws attention to the power of the external poetic performance to be internalized, in what Halliwell terms a “psychological-cum-ethical attraction and assimilation”.⁵²

⁴⁹ Ibid. 397 d-e.
⁵⁰ Ibid., 393-95.
⁵¹ Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, 75.
⁵² Ibid. The passages Halliwell is examining are: Plato, The Republic, 397e, 409c, 12.

Reversing Plato’s critique of mimesis in the invitation to the reader, nosce teipsum, Hobbes suggests the destabilization of the psychological unity of the general man in the state of nature amounts to a positive turn of events, because it promises to lead to ethical improvement through self-knowledge. For Plato, the question of education is paramount, because it replaces the natural learning process with education towards goodness, and this education must be attentive to the characters in epics so that they do not counter-act the objective of education in general, to cultivate stable, whole souls. There is a striking difference between Plato’s critique of mimesis, and Hobbes’s valorization and deployment of it. When Hobbes characterizes the coming into being of the political world occurring as though on a stage, he revalues theatrum mundi for the purpose of a modern account of constitution against Plato’s critique of the appearing world in Book X. When Hobbes opens the introduction to Leviathan with nosce tiepsum, or read thyself, he revalues Book III’s critique of poetry and its relationship to learning. Hobbes’s revaluation of mimesis against Plato’s critique of it is a lens that illuminates Hobbes’s approach to ethics. While Plato insists that education must form stable, whole souls, Hobbes by contrast implies with his invitation to the reader, that
any reader can ethically better himself by looking into his similarity with an ethically bad person, in this case the general man in the state of nature.

Platonic souls, Hobbesian materialism

A fundamental distinction between Plato and Hobbes’s approach to the question of the ethical citizen, is in the difference between Plato’s approach to the question of the just soul, and Hobbes’s materialism. Plato figured all movement of the soul as instability and corruptive force. A stable, non-corrupt soul would have a ruling part controlling its passionate part.53

53
Plato, The Republic, 402d, 10c, 45a-b.

In contrast to a search for the ideal organization of the soul, Hobbes bases his view of men’s actions on the passions, and even characterizes them as the guiding force of reason. “The whole summe of Desires, Aversions, Hopes, and Fears, continued till the thing be either done, or thought impossible, is what we call deliberation.”54 Since the mechanical sciences concerned the study of movement, Hobbes is centrally interested in the movement of the passions, rather than imagining that a rational part of the soul ought to dominate them. A mark of Hobbes’s departure from a Platonic ethics, is that he depicts men becoming ethical, which requires an account of learning and becoming good over the course of a general history while the Republic remains focused on the character of the ideal soul or transcendental ethical standards. 55 Hobbes needs to account for men becoming ethical, because normative conformity to some extent is a precondition of the rule of law.56 Hobbesian ethics is not characterized by a drive toward ethical perfectionism, instead, Hobbes is famous for beginning with the ‘pessimistic’ view of man, due to his partiality to self and desire to dominate rather than
live reciprocally with others.57 Leviathan seeks to show how men can become ethically good enough to engage in a social covenant, rising out of the ethical disorder of the state of nature, not in order to form an ethically substantial polity, but just enough to facilitate the normative conformity necessary for a covenant.58

⁵⁴ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 44.
⁵⁵ Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 13.
⁵⁶ Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford [Eng.]: Clarendon Press, 1975).
⁵⁷ Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis ([Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1963), ix, x, 3.
⁵⁸ Richard E. Flathman, Willful Liberalism : Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 38-43.

Through the invitation to the reader, read thyself, or nosce tiepsum, Hobbes alludes to the poetic dimension of mimesis in the Republic, because he acknowledges auditors or
readers may attempt to imitate the character they hear or read about. Hobbes clearly revalues mimesis against the Platonic critique because he has a very different account of what role-playing means for ethics and politics. For Plato, each person ought to only know one role corresponds to the role he ought to enact for the common good of the Republic.59 In Leviathan, the general man plays at least two roles, that of the pursuer of natural right without regard to natural law, and that of a natural law abider.60 Hobbes creates a series of scenes depicting the general man with different organizations of knowledge and power. For Plato the effect on the soul of effective poetry is destabilization. Hobbes begins by with a bad man, in terms of the general man and the reader, so this man’s destabilization in the course of Leviathan’s poetic development can only mean a movement towards greater ethical order. Leviathan’s poetic mimesis: how the bad man becomes good The poetic dimension of mimesis in Leviathan depicts the bad man in the state of nature going through a process of recognition and reversal, recognizing right reason, and adhering to the normative order of the laws of nature in order to covenant.61 Hobbes presents a portrait of an ethically bad man becoming a norm abider in order to inspire in the reader the same type of ethical change, as the reader follows the general man. In the introduction’s promise to show the reader how to govern, Hobbes argues that he teaches this to the reader by showing him the passions of the
general man. Hobbes employs the ethico-poetic recommendations found in Aristotle’s Poetics and Petrarch’s On my own ignorance and that of many others. According to Aristotle, in looking on as the protagonist suffers from the consequences of his hamartia, the reader or spectator of a tragic drama undergoes catharsis, widely interpreted as a training of the passions.62

⁵⁹ Plato, The Republic, 394e-95, 97c.
⁶⁰ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 191.
⁶¹ Ibid., 21, 111; Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 50a34, 52a15. Terence Cave, Recognitions : A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1988), 2, 3.
⁶² Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 49a34, 53a10, 60b12. Robert J. Yanal, “Aristotle’s Definition of Poetry,” No√ªs 16, no. 4 (1982): 502. T. C. W. Stinton, “Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy,” The Classical Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1975): 226. Eckart Schütrumpf, “Traditional Elements in the Concept of Hamartia in Aristotle’s Poetics,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 92(1989): 140.
63

In my view, the poetic dimension of Leviathan borrows from Aristotle’s Poetics because the idea his readers’ passions may be in need of training accords with the prominent role Hobbes assigns to the passions in his account of ethical becoming. Hobbes’s invocation of nosce teipsum also alludes to Petrarch’s view of the ethical improvement possible in the confrontation between an ethically ambiguous reader and the poetic dimension of mimesis.63 Hobbes, following Petrarch, and revaluing Plato’s observation about poetry’s ability to effect men, does not denounce the ethical malleability of men, as Plato does, but uses it to argue for ways in which a man can better himself.64 Petrarch advocated reading as a path to self-knowledge, thematizing the conscience as a mode of critical self-examination.65 Petrarch revalues role-playing in the intersection of anthropological and textual mimesis, as a means of arriving at self-consciousness and a new relationship between knowledge, self-knowledge, and ethical orientation. Petrarch argues that the force of the text arises out of the reader following the character’s ethical transformation from bad to good. Instead of arguing the reader or spectator
will become morally ambiguous himself, Petrarch argues that in identifying with a bad man who becomes good, the reader or spectator becomes self-conscious of his own desire to travel the same path.66

63
Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kriesteller, and John Herman Randall (Chicago,: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), 124.
⁶⁴ Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 46. Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” 104.
⁶⁵ Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 67. Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” 103, 04, 05.
⁶⁶ Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” 104, 5.

In reading accounts of bad men who became good by listening to their conscience, the reader learns how to engage his conscience in critical self-examination. The reader learns about himself, namely, that his conscience can be the source of his ethical improvement, as he reads about men who ethically improved themselves in this way. Petrarch records his experience reading Cicero, claiming it ignited his own path to ethical personhood. Petrarch also recalls Augustine’s confession that his path from ethical depravity to goodness was inspired by reading Abrose and Cicero’s Hortensius.67 In each case, the poetic dimension of mimesis has an effect on the reader’s natural propensity to engage in imitation in a learning process. If we consider the poetic dimension of mimesis successfully appeals to its reader’s natural tendency to imitate, then Hobbes’s reader is invited to follow the example of a bad man becoming good, arriving at self-knowledge or awakening his conscience through reading.68

⁶⁷ Ibid., 105, 10, 13.
⁶⁸ Michael Oakeshott, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” in Rationalism in Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 309.

While Plato warns against the possibility that poetry can destabilize souls as it incites imitative behavior, in my view, Hobbes’s invocation of nosce teipsum attempts to employ the poetic dimension of mimesis for exactly this purpose, following Petrarch’s thesis that a reader can be led to an ethical reversal as a text facilitates self-knowledge. Imitating the bad man who becomes good, for Petrarch is the way a text can be effective, or teach the reader-reorganizing the relationship between knowledge, self-knowledge, and ethical orientation predominating in him. Hobbes stylistic choices reflect the fact that he appreciated the ethically malleable character of men, and notices, following Petrarch, that bad men can become good through reading. Hobbes follows Aristotle’s Poetics and Petrarch’s On my own ignorance when he creates a scene of ethical change in Leviathan. I will argue, following Aristotle’s analysis, that Leviathan depicts a moment of recognition and reversal, because the plot depicts the future subject citizens becoming self conscious of the limitations of their reason and power. The reversal and recognition occurs as a consequence of the extreme scene of the state of nature, the general men recognize the rules of right reason, the laws of nature, and reverse their comportment to abide by the normative standards preconditioning the rule of law.69 Since Hobbes says that these laws are known in foro interno, or in the consciences of the covenantors, then the ethical transition from natural right pursuer to natural law follower involves an awakening of the conscience. Hobbes joins Aristotle and Petrarch in arguing that poetrycan facilitate a mode of learning tantamount to becoming self conscious, and that the poetry that can effect this reorganizes the relationship between knowledge, self-knowledge and ethics in its reader or spectator.70

⁶⁹ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 71.
⁷⁰ Plato, The Republic, 390d, 95c-d. Aristotle, Benardete, and Davis, Aristotle on Poetics, 1449b. Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” 104, 05.

Each of these texts addresses the question of how a text or drama affects its reader or spectator in a way that is ethically beneficial. Leviathan follows these predecessors in arguing that there is a relationship between knowledge, self-knowledge, and ethical orientation, organized in a dynamic between author or dramatist and reader or spectator. Hobbes’s revalorization of Plato’s critique of mimesis from Book III of the Republic, does not only revalue the poetic dimension of mimesis, it also announces he thinks about the inculcation of ethical behavior in exactly the way that Plato felt was dangerous, through the natural tendency of men to imitate characters they read or hear about. Anthropological mimesis: the natural propensity to imitate Hobbes places anthropological mimesis, or the natural tendency to imitate others, at the center of the ethical problems of the state of nature. Since Hobbes’s materialism conceives of man as moving towards the objects of his passions and away from his aversions, the general man’s arrival at the normative conformity that preconditions the rule of law entails a specific organization of the passions, the organization that accords with right reason. In focusing on the mimetic dynamics involved in both the disorders of the state of nature and the account of constitutive power as it constructs normative and political order, this dissertation deepens Victoria Kahn’s argument that mimesis is “both a source of conflict and a solution to the problem of political obligation” in Leviathan. ⁷¹ In Book III of the Republic, Plato’s interlocutors discuss anthropological mimesis or the tendency of youth to imitate in a natural learning process as a feature of behavior in the condition of the absence of known and agreed upon transcendental standards of the good. In the Republic, these standards and the appropriate education of the youth are under discussion.

In Hobbes’s Leviathan, the problem of the state of nature is that in the absence of an agreed upon authority, men have disincentives to recognize an objective standard by which to form their desires. Instead, each man proposes his own judgment of what this objective standard should be as the objective one, as a means to gain dominance over others.72 Leviathan depicts men looking to one another to establish what is desirable, and evaluating one another’s status by reading signs of honor and dishonor in one another’s comportment.73 The reason a man reads these signs is to try to ascertain his own place in the social hierarchy.74

71
Victoria Ann Kahn, Wayward Contracts : The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 141.
⁷² Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 33.
⁷³ Ibid., Chapter X.
⁷⁴ Ibid., 87, 88.

Scholars in the history of literary criticism term this problem– that men have no objective standard by which to form their desires, but look to one another to establish what is desirable “the problem of mimetic desire,” and note that this conceit informs many early Romantic plots.75 The problem of mimetic desire explains how learning through
imitation leads to rivalry and enmity. 76 Victoria Kahn explains:

According to the structure of mimetic desire, passion is never spontaneous but always a matter of imitation. The rival is the precondition of the hero’s desire. In fact, what the hero desires is to be like his rival, to take his place, which of course means to kill him (although, if he does, the hero’s desire will be frustrated since it was always a desire for his enemy, a desire to imitate his desire). In this model, imitation could be deadly; at the very least, it was a source of conflict.77

In Leviathan, the anthropological dimension of mimesis serves as explanation for normative and political disorder. In the state of nature, men use language strategically in the competition for social dominance.78 The problem of mimetic desire motivates men to disagree with one another on the definitions of terms, impeding the development of civil society by turning any normative consensus into an argument, so that the rival cannot win the upper hand through his use of language. While the poetic and linguistic dimensions of mimesis show how men can create order, the anthropological dimension of mimesis explains conflict. In this kind of conflict, there is no teleological end.
Either men recognize an authority figure who can impose an objective standard by which to organize their desires and are able to come to agreements on the value of things and values, or they do not. The anthropological dimension of mimesis does not certainly move in one ethical direction, because the mutual imitation of the natural, social learning process can lead to normative agreement or disagreement. The anthropological dimension of mimesis does not itself explain how the multitude constructs the political authority under which they will live. Instead, it explains the

75
Victoria Kahn, “Hobbes, Romance, and the Contract of Mimesis,” Political Theory 29, no. 1 (2001):
6. René Girard, Mensonge Romantique Et Vérité Romanesque (Paris,: Grasset, 1961), 12.
⁷⁶ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 88.
⁷⁷ Kahn, Wayward Contracts : The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674, 6.
⁷⁸ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 33.

ground or the dynamics of imitation between men out of which normative order has to arise. In arguing that there is no teleological end to conflict based in the anthropological dimension of mimesis, I am arguing that the state of nature develops into the civil state on account of Hobbes’s employment of poetic mimesis, and the future subject citizens’s employment of the linguistic dimension of mimesis. In my reading of Leviathan, Hobbes is self-consciousness about poetic style, but does not forward a philosophy of history. In other words, Hobbes plots the scenes of Leviathan so that each follows the previous according to probability or necessity, according to the stylistic
recommendations in Aristotle’s Poetics. This does not mean, however, that this necessity is a principle of nature, or that all states of nature transition into civil states necessarily. The linguistic dimension of mimesis While Hobbes relies on anthropological mimetic dynamics to explain discord, he employs a linguistic dimension of mimesis to explain how norms are formed out of the conditions of the state of nature. While the poetic dimension of mimesis illuminates the mimetic dynamics between author and reader through the design of a story, myth or epic that can effect the knowledge, self-knowledge, and ethical orientation of the auditor or reader, the linguistic dimension of mimesis concerns the dynamic between author and reader or speaker and auditor when language use effectively paints a picture in words, so that the reader or auditor can ‘see’ what the author is saying.79

79
Horace and H. Rushton Fairclough, Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, Rev. ed., Loeb Classical Library (London New York,: W. Heinemann ; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929), 480 line 361. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 185, 89.

Although the poetic dimension of mimesis contributes to whether or not the reader or auditor can see what the author or speaker is saying, poetic mimesis refers to the organization of the whole story while mimetic language use refers simply to the ability of words to form pictures in others’ imaginations. In Leviathan, men can come to agreement on definitions and meanings of terms when language use in the public sphere is perspicuous. Perspicuity is the term Hobbes uses for both the poetic and the linguistic dimension of mimesis.80 Quentin Skinner explains the effectiveness of poetic and linguistic mimesis is due to its ability to turn the reader or auditor into a spectator. The author or speaker creates an image in words, or organizes a discourse clearly so the reader can ‘see’ what the author is saying.81 I argue that in the Greek and Latin traditions, language use meeting the criteria of what Hobbes terms ‘perspicuity’ is discussed in terms of the linguistic dimension of mimesis.82 Mimetic language use has preoccupied political thinking since Plato’s Cratylus, a dialogue which explores how men “show” one another what they are saying by creating images with words.83 In the
Cratylus, the interlocutors question whether or not the vividness of the images created in words corresponds to degrees of reality. They conclude that words, even vividly imagistic ones, do not reveal essences.84 The interlocutors evaluation of the linguistic dimension of mimesis in the Cratylus bears an affinity with the Republic in the sense that it refers to the ontological hierarchy between real and appearing worlds.85

⁸⁰ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 10, 36, 37.
⁸¹ Ibid. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 183.
⁸² Plato, Cratylus, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1998), 422e-23a. Cicero et al., “De Inventione.” Quintilian and Butler, The Institutio Oratoria of
Quintilian. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 84, 85, 101-3, 25, 87.
83 Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, 43-46. Sörbom, Mimesis and Art 107.
⁸⁴ Plato, Cratylus, 439a-b. Timothy M. S. Baxter, The Cratylus : Plato’s Critique of Naming, Philosophia Antiqua, V. 58 (Leiden ; New York: E.J. Brill, 1992), 14. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, 44-5.
⁸⁵ Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis : Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, 45, 48. Sörbom, Mimesis and Art
116. Baxter, The Cratylus : Plato’s Critique of Naming, 13.

In employing the linguistic dimension of mimesis to show how men can create norms out of the condition of the state of nature, Hobbes clearly revalues the linguistic dimension of mimesis.86 The Latin rhetorical tradition alternately repeats the Platonic critique of the linguistic dimension of mimesis and revalorizes mimetic language use. Cicero’s De Inventione follows the Platonic separation of language and knowledge declaring “wisdom is powerless to speak.”87 In arguing that the linguistic dimension of mimesis can be relevant in the establishment of ethical norms, however, Quintilian and Cicero note that making images with words was considered a way of moving one’s readers or auditor around to the author or speaker’s point of view.88 The ability to move readers or auditors, in other words the force of imagistic language, is termed vis in the rhetorical tradition.89 In addition to noting that mimetic language can exert a force in showing the auditor what one is saying in order to move him, Quintilian and Cicero also argue that this kind of force does not conflict with the pursuit or communication of knowledge. Both giants of the Latin rhetorical tradition argue that there is a rhetorical style appropriate to the goals of philosophy by emphasizing that mimetic language amounts to painting something in its truest color.90 In the Latin rhetorical tradition, perspicuous language is a way of presenting knowledge in its truest color, and it carries with it a force or vis when presented in this way. For Quintilian and Cicero, the force of well-written or well-spoken language aids learning.

86
Vivienne Gray, “Mimesis in Greek Historical Theory,” The American Journal of Philology 108, no. 3 (1987). The linguistic and poetic dimensions of mimesis criticized by Plato formed the basis of classical poetry criticism.
⁸⁷ Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 3.
⁸⁸ Ibid., 111, 83.
⁸⁹ Ibid., 55, 98.
⁹⁰ Ibid., 104.

The Latin rhetorical tradition’s view on the clarity of mimetic language use led early modern scientific communities to rely on this standard of written language when developing norms for scientific reports.91 A proposition can count as true or part of a discourse of knowledge, for Hobbes, if the speaker or author presents “evidence” in words to the auditor.92 Presenting evidence through mimetic language was the standard adopted by the Royal Society, and was adapted from the poetry of Horace to Galileo’s description of the elegance of geometry. In my reading of Leviathan, Hobbes employs the linguistic dimension of mimesis to describe the knowledge/power the general man employs to rise above the disorders of anthropological mimesis and recognize the laws of nature. The creation of the norms preconditioning the rule of law, or the simultaneous recognition of the laws of nature, relies on the agency on both sides of the dynamic, the speaker or author has agency over what he writes or says, or the image he draws in words for others, and the reader or auditor has agency in how he “sees” what is being said.93 Everyone has to ‘see’ that the laws of nature constitute the causes of peace, and ‘see’ this so vividly that the result is consensus and norm abidance. Mimetic language accounts for how men can teach each other by creating images with words. I will argue that mimetic language is a way of thinking about the political possibilities arising out of language use, and so informs how citizens relate to one another as agents in founding and maintaining political authority.

91
Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, “Head and Hand: Rhetorical Resources in British Pedagogical Writing, 1770-1850,” Oxford Review of Education 2, no. 3 (1976): 241. Peter Dear, “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76, no. 2 (1985): 152.
⁹² Thomas Hobbes and Ferdinand Tönnies, The Elements of Law, Natural & Politic, Cambridge English Classics (Cambridge [Eng.]: The University Press, 1928), 64; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 308.
⁹³ Martel, Subverting the Leviathan : Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat, 2.

Tension between critique and value of mimesis continues in modernity

While theatricality or the framework of theatrum mundi was a way of analyzing politics and ethics since classical times, theatricality remained a maligned aspect of political
theory because the Platonic critique of role-playing survived into the early modern period in various forms and is known in scholarship as the “anti-theatrical prejudice.”94
Neo-Platonists criticized theatricality inheriting Plato’s argument that continual role-play destabilizes the soul and so prevents goodness. Christian piety arguments circulated in Renaissance England disapproving of theatricality and theaters as bastions of immorality and abomination.Thomas Postlewait notes that the anti-theatrical discourse circulated in a culture that had an ambivalent relation to theatre, since theatricality was an integral aspect of life in Renaissance England. The critique of theatrum mundi accords with the Christian idea that there is another, real eternal God beyond the appearing world, and Plato’s idea that the forms, but not the appearing world are eternal. In both the Platonic and Christian traditions, “the vanity of earthly shows is balanced by the hope that life here is but a mere shadow of true existence.”95 The evaluation of
the present world as less than another more ideal realm is accompanied by a critique of “artificial” behavior, inevitable in the “artificial” as opposed to real world.

94
Thomas Postlewait, “Theatricality and Anti-Theatricality in Renaissance London,” in Theatricality: Theatre and Performance Theory, ed. Tracy C. and Postlewait Davis, Thomas (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Davis and Postlewait, “Introduction,” 4.

There are contemporary works on Plato contesting the association of his oeuvre with an unambiguous anti-theatrical prejudice. Susan Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements : Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
⁹⁵ Davis and Postlewait, “Introduction.”

Davis and Postlewait explain that theatrical mimesis could be observed in daily life in Renaissance England. “The idea of theatrum mundi also suggests that human beings are required to act out their social identities in daily life. All individuals, as Ben Jonson expressed the theatrum mundi conceit, are controlled by a mimetic impulse ‘I have considered our whole life is like a Play: wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. Nay, we so insist in imitating others, as we cannot (when it is necessary) return to our selves: like Children, that imitates the vices of Stammerers so long, till at last they become such.’”96 What survives in Jonson’s figuration of mimesis is the Renaissance is the idea that play-acting can shape ethical disposition. The element of Plato’s philosophy Aristotle and Petrarch contest, is the idea that this is necessarily bad. While Jonson argues that theatricality can lead to a lack of knowledge of oneself, repeating the Platonic critique, the shifting social identities accompanying the change in economic structure in Renaissance England meant that social identity roles were less clearly defined. Steven Mullaney argues that Elizabethan popular drama, beginning around 1588 was a social phenomena, a cradle ofexperimentation with new social roles.

Theater is the most social of the arts, in terms of its mode of production—it is completed only in performance, and thus it is produced not only for but also by its audience—and in terms of the means and objects of its embodied representations—it uses actual bodies to enact or embody virtual selves (or characters) on stage, in imaginary social relation to one another.97 Mullaney writes that this lasted long after the Elizabethan period technically came to a close, as long as “what was in doubt for them was any reliable sense of a collective self.”98 Despite the fact that English religious and political cultures had always retained theatrical elements, and despite the fact that a changing landscape of social mores could be explored theatrically, the prejudice against mimesis in the tradition of political thought survived. 

96
Ibid., 10. Ben Jonson and James D. Redwine, Ben Jonson’s Literary Criticism, Regents Critics Series (Lincoln,: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 14.
⁹⁷ Steven Mullaney, “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage,” 100.
⁹⁸ Ibid.

The distrust of theater for the purposes of citizenship survives into modernity with Jean Jacques Rousseau’s critique of the arts on account of the corruptive effect on the rationally consistent will.99 Rousseau, whose central anxiety concerns telling the difference between virtue and its appearance, joins Plato and in arguing theatricality is rightly maligned as an obstacle the creation of the ideal polity. 100 What Rousseau has in common with Plato is a view that the passions, which can be stirred up by theatricality interfere with reason.101 For Rousseau, too much exposure to the arts threatens the rational consistency of the will, because it threatens to give reign to the passions without strengthening a man’s ability to maintain a rationally consistent will.102 Since Hobbes reevaluates the relationship between reason and the passions, and holds them to be inseparable, his view of the grounds of human action also differs. Hobbes posits neither a soul in which the rational part ought to dominate the passionate part, nor a will, which must use reason to temper the passions. In my view, Hobbes takes up Aristotle’s ethical question of the training of the passions, attempting to facilitate an organization of the passions through his emplotment of Leviathan.103 Theatricality and nosce tiepsum are the plot devises creating the plausibility of the overall story–that the multitude and reader are capable of training their own passions, through becoming self-reflective. On the basis of the idea that a man’s conscience canawaken, Hobbes presents theatricality as an outward art that reflects man’s ethical malleability, specifically his ability to pass from an ethically disordered person who seeks only domination, to
a man who becomes a norm abider as he listens to what his conscience is telling him in foro interno. 

99
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Susan Dunn, and Gita May, “A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” in The Social Contract ; and, the First and Second Discourses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8,
15.
¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 5.
¹⁰¹ Ibid., 8.
¹⁰² Ibid., 21.
¹⁰³ Victoria Ann Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, ed. Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 538. Michel Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76, 1st ed. (New York: Picador, 2003), 37, 38.

Mimesis rather than materialism

This reading stands against interpretations accounting for the foundation of the commonwealth solely on the basis of Hobbes’s mechanico-materialist psychology.104 The mechanico-materialist psychology explains how men’s passionate states are produced in a reactive way to external stimuli in their environments. The mimetic dynamics, however, explain how men can act as agents in arriving at the normative conformity requisite for the rule of law, and effecting the norms and under which they live. In other words, mechanically the environment can move a man’s passions, and with agency, men can move one another’s. Leviathan is a story about how the general man assumes political obligation and creates political authority in the covenanting moment. Covenanting can be described as a political act, because the mutual taking on of political obligation creates a unified commonwealth out of a multitude by making appear a sovereign to represent the person of the state.105 Covenanting is also a norm reaffirming activity because the laws of nature, the precondition of civil law, become ensconced by the civil law.

104
Spragens, The Politics of Motion; the World of Thomas Hobbes. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas. Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker : Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008).
¹⁰⁵ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 120.
¹⁰⁶ Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 122.

Reading the text according to the mechanico-materialist psychology alone leads to the conclusion that there is no normative agency in following the laws of nature or covenanting because the frightening appearance of the sovereign, reconciles reason and motive in the covenanting moment. As a result, the social covenant can be described as something that befalls the men in the state of nature rather than something they are agents in. The laws of nature, according to the deterministic tenor of the text lent by the mechanico-materialist psychology, do not amount to an ethical philosophy but simply suggest the requirement that a population be normalized in order to be amenable to the imposition of the rule of law. The obscurity of agency given the mechanico-materialist psychology is the reason why Kahn employs the Foucauldian term “normalization” as she analyzes the Hobbesian laws of nature.107 According to this typical reading, the force of the fear of the sovereign continues to function in the context of the civil state. Men obey, because they are afraid of the power of the sovereign to punish or exclude them from the commonwealth as a consequence of disobedience.108 Obedience involves no political agency according to the readings in which men are reactive to the appearance of the sovereign as determined by the mechanico-materialist effects of perception. Against this reading, I argue the mimetic dynamics structuring Leviathan, and the mimetic dynamics between men as they create norms, means Hobbesian men count as political agents; they employ the imitative arts to create a commonwealth. In the state of nature they use their agency to create the covenant and its condition, the appearance of sovereignty; they are responsible for their norm creating performances their performances in the covenanting moment. They are also agents in coming to right reason or agreeing on the norms expressed in the laws of nature, because they are responsible for using language in a way that helps others see. The prevalent interpretation argues that Hobbes’s reconciliation of reason and motive through fear means that the laws of nature cannot represent a true ethic, which has to be something that would be done regardless of expediency.109

107
Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76, 37, 38; Kahn, “The Duty to Love: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” 538.
¹⁰⁸ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 96, 101.
¹⁰⁹ David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford,: Clarendon Press, 1969), 90.

In other words, traditional ethical thinking argues that the knowledge that corresponds to ethicshas to be unforced, but Hobbes, following the Latin rhetorical tradition argues that there is a kind of language use that has a force yet is nevertheless associated with truth and self knowledge.110 Hobbes attributes the general man in the state of nature two different types of reasoning. Hobbes suggests everyone deliberates or follows the alternation of his own appetites and aversions towards their satisfaction.111 If we follow the plot of Leviathan according to the idea that the general man deliberates, or engages in a process of finding causal relations in order to satisfy the passions, he ends in the situation of the extreme scene, in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.112 Alone in a post war scene, the general man recognizes his lack of reason, his inability to understand causal relations to an extent that would leave him capable of satisfying all his own needs.113 Humbled by his recognition of his non-knowledge, he invents a god on whom to blame his bad fortune.114

110
Plato, The Republic. Plato and Zeyl, Gorgias. Cicero et al., “De Inventione.” Both of these are texts in which wisdom is powerless to speak.
¹¹¹ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 17, 22, 29, 38.
¹¹² Ibid., 76, 89. The nasty, brutish, and short scene is comparable to the punishment of Prometheus scene in the earlier religion chapter.
¹¹³ Ibid., 76.
¹¹⁴ Ibid.

In one sense, the general man reacts to the appearance of a god, but in another sense, his self-recognition plays a role in the construction of this god. His change in ethical
orientation is accompanying by a new realization, that of his non-knowledge, and his newly weak self recognizes this and creates a god out of frustration concerning his own ignorance. If we follow the plot of Leviathan according to the idea that the general man comes to right reason, or recognizes the laws of nature are the causes of peace and covenants, the same option between explaining this through mechanico-materialism or mimesis presents itself and once again only mimesis explains the ethical and political agency involved. Hobbes notes that a man would only agree to abide by the laws of nature out of a recognition that he may not be able to dominate all of his fellows, in other words, the arrival at right reason constitutes a recognition of the limitation of one’s own power.115

115
Ibid., 109. Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis, 57. Strauss’s Hegelian reading of the turning point of the Leviathan argues that it is a real fight, which is clearly an importation of the Hegelian formula back into Leviathan. 

Reading Leviathan either through the lens of deliberation or through the lens of right reason, man’s ethical shift can be explained as motivated or caused by fear. The general man obeys the laws of nature out of fear of the sovereign, as a reaction to overwhelming visual stimuli. Defined in this way, the covenanting moment appears to be void of agency, because in simply reacting to the sovereign appearance, they are not active in a way that requires a sense of responsibility. The orientation of the passions that accords with right reason, appears to be forced such that the laws of nature can be considered only prudential maxims rather than agreed upon norms. If we read the same text according to the lens of mimesis, then the shift in the general man’s ethical orientation has to do with the mimetic dynamics between author and reader on account of the poetic, linguistic, and theatrical dimensions of mimesis. In other words, Hobbes’s agency in plotting the text contributes to the ‘force’ involved in the general man’s ethical change. Hobbes also presents men’s agency in using mimetic language to make others see what he is saying. Whether considering authors, readers, or the general man depicted in the text, the mimetic arts are involved in the constitutive knowledge and power of the commonwealth constructed in Leviathan. Hobbes employs mimetic language in describing the extreme scene of the state of nature, creating the force of this scene reversing the general man’s ethical orientation. The general man may use perspicuous language in attempting to achieve a normative consensus. The ethical change occurs when everyone simultaneously recognizes the laws of nature. The mechanico-materialist
explanation for man’s psychology argues that this change is forced and so does not constitute an account of ethical agency. Reading Leviathan according to the mimetic dynamics, however, reveals that the reason it can count as a moment in the text reflecting man’s ethical agency because this scene in the plot is the consequence of man’s coming to self-knowledge. The general man in the state of nature changes from pursuing natural right to abiding by natural law because he sees himself differently, either less certain of his ability to find out causal relations by himself, or less certain of his power.116

116
Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 76, 101, 20.

Since Hobbes sets out the reader’s goal as ‘seeing himself’ in the general man depicted in the text, and the state of nature comes to an end when the general man listens to his conscience, at which point he co-creates the appearance of the sovereign through a performance he also spectates. Explaining Leviathan through its poetic and linguistic mimesis reveals in what sense Hobbes thinks of himself and others as ethically responsible agents. Since men can also make each other see in words, they can be held responsible for what they show others in language, and for their interpretations of what they see. Hobbes has a non-literal explanation of how men see, that is essentially social whether the general man deliberates or employs the more rigorous method of ratiocination, mimesis explains the ethical shift in Leviathan from the pursuit of natural right to the abidance by natural law. Hobbes does not argue that the construction of the commonwealth is a pure act of the ethically good will of the multitude. According to the mechanico-materialist aspects of Hobbes’s psychology, men are constrained to move towards the objects of their desire, or cannot help but to think through how to attain them.117 The general man is also constrained by his social history to the extent that it determines his desire to dominate. Despite these constraints on the movements of the passions, Hobbes’s agency and the agency of the general man depicted in the text involve the moving force of poetic and linguistic mimesis. The creation of the commonwealth through the employment of the mimetic arts is not a creation ex nihilo exactly like God’s voluntaristic will, rather, it is socially, historically, and materially conditioned. Hobbes is clearly interested in the consequences of materialism for understanding the human body, nevertheless in order to solve the problem of the know-how of the multitude in covenanting for the civil state, he relies on mimesis. The anthropological, poetic, linguistic, and theatrical aspects of mimesis are proto-social activity present in the state of nature before the covenanting moment. Mimesis is not something the covenant brings into being, rather it appears in Leviathan as part of the natural order that can be utilized to create social orders.

The continuity between the state of nature and the civil state

The first major consequence of reading Leviathan according to the idea that mimesis constitutes the knowledge/power of the general man is a new perspective on the continuity between the state of nature and the civil state. The anthropological dimension of mimesis or natural propensity to imitate, is related to Hobbes’s reader through the general man’s attempt to learn about his power, honor, dignity, and worthiness is through observing signs in others’ behavior towards him.118

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 38.
¹¹⁸ Ibid., Chapter 10.

This natural attempt to assess one’s social status in others’ gestures implies that men perform for one another reflexively in everyday life. The idea that men are performing for one another survives into the context of mask-wearing in the covenanting moment. What the multitude learns in its natural anthropological process is that the laws of nature are the causes of peace, in other words that normative conformity is to some extent a precondition of the rule of law. The way that Hobbes draws on the anthropological dimension of mimesis coheres with his emphasis in the introduction that the commonwealth is a product, construct because in essence, norms are accretions of social performances. Leviathan relates the sense in which norms are built up over time depending on the effects of social performances. The way Hobbes draws on poetic and linguistic mimesis shows that men can be held responsible for the dimensions of this normative conformity because men can actively use poetic structures and mimetic language in creating the normative consensus. Hobbes notices through his observations about the relationship between poetic mimesis and self-knowledge,
and the power of mimetic language that both norms and the laws that codify them are dependent on human performances. I will argue that the covenanting moment is characterized by theatricality, or constitutes what Davis and Postlewait term a theatrical event. “Theatricality is a way of describing what performers and what spectators do together in the making of ‘the theatrical event.’”119

120
Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 88.

In my view, Hobbes’s genealogy of mask wearing in the covenanting moment means that the performative aspect of anthropological mimesis is once again at play. In Leviathan, Hobbes defines the state of nature not by an actual fight, but by the ‘tract of time’ in which “the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.”120

¹¹⁹ Davis and Postlewait, “Introduction,” 6.
¹²⁰ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 88.

Michel Foucault interprets this passage to mean the state of nature is a “theater of presentations.”¹²¹ Theatrum mundi contextualizes the state of nature, a theater of war,
and the covenanting moment, when men to appear to one another as capable of assuming political obligations. The theatrical mimesis of the covenanting moment is similar to the performativity of anthropological mimesis. In each scene in which the general man finds himself, before, during, and after the covenanting moment, men are looking at one another. In the state of nature, they read signs of honor in one another’s behavior, in the covenanting moment, each acts as though he is speaking the same oath vis-à-vis one another.122

¹²¹ Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at te Collège De France, 1975-76, 92.

¹²² Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 64-69, 111, 20.

The continuity between the state of nature and the civil state that a focus on mimesis illuminates is the continuously performative character of men’s social relations. In exploring this continuity, I found that Hobbes’s reliance theatrum mundi and theatricality in the covenanting moment evokes the idea that theaters can be norm-creating spaces, because it is in the theater of the covenant that the normative orientation of the laws of nature become codified, and the multitude becomes a people under law. The performative aspect of following natural law means that the interpretation of the laws of nature at a given historical moment is relative to performances seen as following this law, in this way, norm and polity creation can take place in the mimetic dynamic between actors and spectators. Theatrical mimesis, alongside poetic and linguistic mimesis, counts as an imitative art involved in the knowledge/power of the constitution of the commonwealth. Theatrum mundi creates the contextual continuity between natural and social order, which means there is no hard and fast line between non-civil and civil society.Focusing on the performative dimension of human action, in the transition from the state of nature to the civil state illuminates a new perspective on the force involved in the covenant. Readers are not accustomed to looking for continuity between the anti-social sociality of the state of nature and the civil state.123 Focusing on the mimetic dynamics loosens the grip Hobbes’s plot has had in the imaginations of its interpreters. While the reading that to stay in the state of nature amounts to a logical contradiction has been well documented, once the historical texture of Leviathan is recognized this reading becomes more problematic because it implies a logical development of history, understood as a universal psychology.124

123 George Shulman, “Hobbes, Puritans, and Promethean Politics,” Political Theory 16, no. 3 (1988). Sheldon S. Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Seminar Papers ([Los Angeles]: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California Los Angeles, 1970). While the sharp line between freedom and authority is recognized in all interpretations, this has usually meant that interpreters overlook continuities between the state of nature and the civil state.

124 Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes. S. A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’ Leviathan : The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, Studies in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes : Its Basis and Its Genesis. Strauss terms Leviathan a typical history and
compares its recognition and reversal scene to Hegel’s.

A focus on mimesis exposes the non-teleological dimension of the text. When taking into consideration the idea that norms and the commonwealth are formed through poetic, linguistic and theatrical mimesis, one can see that political authority remains a contingent achievement. Mimesis reveals that states of nature do not necessarily move from natural order to social order. Hobbes is not arguing that man in a universal sense is destined to recognize the laws of nature. When we look at Leviathan from the perspective of mimesis then the covenant is not about fear or taking a risk living according to the laws of nature. In structuring Leviathan according to the ethico-poetic lessons of Aristotle and Petrarch, Hobbes suggests that the transition from the state of nature to the civil state entails changing one’s image of oneself, becoming self-reflective in a way that eases the desire to dominate and facilitates one’s acceptance of the reciprocity required by the laws of nature. Hobbes is illuminating the way behavior changes after men become self conscious of their lack of knowledge and power and realize that reciprocal social relations, while precluding individual dominance, can address the knowledge/power weaknesses men experience in the extreme stage of the state of nature. Since the transition involves a recognition and reversal, that challenges and changes the ethical orientation of the individual, the shift in knowledge cannot be considered a mere conclusion to a syllogism. The new knowledge that changes the ethical orientation cannot be the same conclusion everyone arrives at, because it involves a realization about oneself. Since fear of the sovereign is preceded by a new self-understanding, the force involved cannot be reduced to a mechanico-materialist reaction to empirical stimuli. The non-teleological aspect of mimesis is in the contingency that others would agree when they ‘see’ what another is saying for example about the laws of nature as the causes of peace. Recognizing that the ability of language to provoke new self-understandings is at the center of Leviathan. In Hobbes’s plot, everyone comes to this realization simultaneously, which makes it less believable. Hobbes both portrays the shift in ethical orientation as the result of an individuals’ self-knowledge, and emplots scenes of social context, leading to the moment of recognition and
reversal. Instead of centering the plot on one protagonist, as ancient tragedy does, Hobbes pluralizes the hero, turning each person in the state of nature into the character who undergoes a recognition and reversal. The vivid scene of life as nasty, brutish, and short, is a post war scene where each man finds himself alone reflecting on his lack of knowledge and power, and makes Hobbes’s plot plausible. The necessity added by fear is not the only account of why and how men move from the state of nature to the civil state. Hobbes draws on mimesis to describe constitutive knowledge/power, which centrally concerns norm formation, constitution and governance. Showing others in a way that is so vivid that it creates consensus is the way in which the mimetic dynamics are integral to the formation of norms. The constitutive powers of the mimetic arts, leads to the question of whether or not the general man retains his constitutive power in the context of the civil state, and I will argue that he does.

Leviathan’s theatrical citizenship

The second consequence of recognizing the mimetic dynamics in Levaithan is a new perspective on the political and ethical agency possible in the context of Hobbesian citizenship. This reading of Leviathan does not argue that men are agents in the state of nature and in the covenanting moment, and then become passively obedient subject-citizens in the context of the civil state.125 Instead, I argue that attention to the performative character of both anthropological and theatrical mimesis means that Hobbesian citizens can be characterized as actors and spectators. Since Hobbes characterizes sovereignty as spectacle, theatrum mundi also frames citizenship; in other words, citizenship takes place within a theatrical space. 126 In addition to defining the unity of the commonwealth by the appearance of the sovereign, the virtue of citizenship, obedience, involves looking up at the sovereign. Hobbes characterizes citizens in the civil commonwealth as actors, since sovereignty is primarily visible. “I speak not of the men, but (in the Abstract) of the Seat of Power.”127

¹²⁵ Shulman, “Hobbes, Puritans, and Promethean Politics,” 439.
126 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 110, 12.
127 Ibid., 3.

Hobbes does not decisively choose between Monarchy and Parliament as the sovereign. He conceives of sovereignty as an institution, an office that could be held by a monarch or a parliament, defined as the ‘representer’ of the person of the commonwealth. The theory of attributable action concludes that sovereignty is he who acts in the name of the commonwealth.128 In terms of visuality, Hobbes argues that as citizens gaze up at the sovereign, what they see is one another, carrying out the roles
comprising sovereignty.129 Hobbes also notes that citizens carry out the offices of sovereignty.130 This means that sovereignty is not one actor, but comprised of many
actor-citizens carrying out the roles comprising sovereignty. Since citizens act in the roles comprising sovereignty, then obedience involves a practice. While Hobbes focuses on the unity and power of the sovereign, sovereignty is an ongoing spectacle comprised of many diverse performances of acting in the name of the commonwealth.131 The idea that many actors carry out the roles of sovereignty means that Hobbes’s sovereign prefigures the modern bureaucratic state.132 In the context the civil state, Hobbesian men are agents in acting the roles of sovereignty and spectating their fellow citizens. The Hobbesian commonwealth is designed to facilitate private felicity, not public criticism of political authority. 133 Many interpreters have argued from these grounds that obedience does not entail the free public use of reason, and as a result, Hobbesian citizens would not be able to engage in significant normative or political action.134

128 Ibid., 114.
129 Ibid., 126, 66.
130 Ibid., 126, 66
131 Ibid., 114.
132 Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision : Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Expanded ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 331. Wolin talks about social policy as one of the main roles of the sovereign. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford,: ClarendonPress, 1962), 92.
133 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 46, 418.
134 Ibid., 114, 20, 21, 24.

The Hobbesian commonwealth could not accommodate active citizenship because the sovereign censors and defines the terms of public discourse in order to preclude ongoing discord. For Hobbes, the ends of sovereignty are obedience, peace, and unity. Terming the sovereign “absolute” also implies subjects are wholly alienated. In other words, some interpreters argue the end of the commonwealth, peace, is purchased at the price of a pacified citizenry who are not agents in the ongoing political life of their commonwealth. In my view, however, Hobbes’s emphasis on the pursuit of felicity does not mean that political action in view of the common good is wholly ruled out.135
Hobbes accounts for agency within the context of the civil state because obedience amounts to an activity, the activity of avowal. Obedience means the citizens ought to avow all of the acts of the sovereign, or those citizens carrying out the roles of the institution of sovereignty, acting in the name of the commonwealth.136 The Hobbesian commonwealth is participatory to the extent that the subject-citizens fill all of the roles comprising sovereignty. Since citizenship involves acting and spectating,
avowal means the spectators are to endlessly approve of sovereign acts. “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.”137 Hanna Pitkin and Quentin Skinner conclude in reference to this quote that Hobbes’s definition of political
representation aspires to endless approval of sovereign acts.138

135 Flathman, Willful Liberalism : Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory and Practice, 34.
136 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 121.
137 Ibid.
138 Pitkin, “Hobbes’s Concept of Representation–I,” 329. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 182.

The theatrical space created by this political representation however, implies citizens could create a public space in which disapproval of sovereign acts could occur. The theatrical aspect of citizenship lends a new perspective to the political and normative agency open to the obedient citizen. The reciprocity of social relations demanded by the laws of nature ought to be examined through the context of men acting as citizens in a civil state where the law attempts to codify the laws of nature. 

The reciprocity involved in theatricality entails interplay between actors and spectators in the bureaucratic state. Citizens acting in the official roles comprising sovereignty, in my view, actively create and maintain the norms of what it means to enact that role. Each performance interprets a norm, and spectators judge both the norm affirmed and the performance. Since avowal and obedience are performances entailing acting and spectatorship, Hobbes implies a public space exists. Spectating citizens can evaluate the norms and laws reinforced by the diverse spectacles of sovereignty, exerting political and normative agency in their commentary or criticism on them. Recognizing the context of citizenship is the commonwealth, a newly created theatrum mundi , means that citizens can reaffirm or change the normative consensus on what it means to enact a particular bureaucratic role through critical spectatorship. Those citizens who actively spectate the sovereign in its many roles, can interpret a performance— approving, disapproving, or judging through whatever means they have available to them. Since laws are public utterances, the same is true for laws. In my view, the agency to criticize or approve, in other words the agency to judge the acting comprising sovereignty, inheres in the activity of spectating. According this reading, in which obedience or avowal is constituted by a mimetic dynamic between actor and spectator, political authority cannot be guaranteed into the future, because obedience is an effect of the political action involved in mimetic avowal. In other words, in witnessing the judge carry out his role, the spectator can “see himself,” or decide that he does not “see himself” in the judge’s performance. This means that the mimetic dynamic involved in obedience as avowal, could contingently also result in disavowal, because spectatorship implies the agency to criticize the performance. The meanings of the performances constituting sovereignty are the result of the dialog between what is expressed by the actor and the spectators’ responses. Political obedience, then, does not prevent political action in a way that is normatively meaningful. Each performance affects the meaning of what it means to inhabit the role, in other words, the norms reinforced by sovereign acts depend on the performances of the subject-citizens themselves. Further, since the performances are spectated, they can be criticized. Citizens on the spectating end of avowal can start a dialogue about the way in which public roles ought to be performed. A citizen can act as an agent, despite obedience, when he acts in a role comprising sovereignty or spectates others.139 As an actor, he has an opportunity to shape the normative consensus through his performance. This means citizens’ ongoing spectation and action, affects the normative consensus or the relation between knowledge, self-knowledge and ethical action of the “public conscience.”140 Spectating citizens can judge and thereby influence the normative consensus arising out of the performance, just as actors enacting their roles and responding to spectators can affect the political orientation of the polity. The theatrical mimetic dynamics of citizenship mean citizens participate in ways that meaningfully shape the normative consensus, interpret laws and interpret roles of sovereignty. In my view this comprises the ongoing possibility of ethics and politics in the Hobbesian commonwealth. The theatrical mimesis of citizenship suggests the possibility for ongoing political and normative agency available to citizens in the Hobbesian commonwealth. Hobbes’s argument is that the social covenant will create obedient citizens in a unified polity, apolity that could not be disturbed by speech from below. My argument is that the grounds for contesting the conclusion that the Hobbesian commonwealth

¹³⁹ Granted, the pool of actors in the sovereign as bureaucracy would not include everyone, and there could be economic and social challenges to acting and spectatorship. The theatrical context of the civil state does not guarantee equality of participation.
¹⁴⁰ Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 124, 223.

would necessarily be populated by wholly alienated, totally pacified subjects lies in the fact that Hobbes depicts men as performative vis-à-vis one another in an ongoing way,
in the state of nature, the covenanting moment, and finally in the context of citizenship. My argument disturbing Hobbes’s aim to have described a unified, pacified polity is that attention to mimetic dynamics illuminates the way the commonwealth can be considered a theatrical space, and so citizenship involves the possibility of political and
normative agency. Hobbes risks peace and order, because obedience to the sovereign could turn into critical spectatorship destabilizing political authority. Linguistic mimesis, as well as theatrical mimesis, can be involved in shaping the character of the political space. The ability of the spectators to take a critical perspective on the norms enacted in sovereign acts would at first seem to be contradicted by Hobbes’s argument that the sovereign is the authoritative definer, or sets the terms of public discourse, and censors this discourse to promote the conditions of avowal.141 Hobbes’s promotion of mimetic language use, however, works against his intentions to establish a commonwealth impervious to contestation. Hobbes argues that laws and other public discourse ought to be perspicuous, or be the kind of language use in which the auditor can see what the speaker is saying.142 I argue that mimetic language use cannot fix the meaning of terms because seeing clearly the evidence presented by the others’ perspicuous language use does not necessarily result in agreement. In other words, I argue that mimetic language is inherently polyvalent, and spectators can glean more than one single meaning from an instance of public discourse.

141 Ibid., 124.
142 Ibid., 11, 36, 37.

Leviathan’s place in Late Renaissance England’s preoccupation with theatricality Hobbes employment of theatrical dynamics in accounting for the transition from the state of nature to the civil state coheres with the preoccupation of his larger social and historical context. In my view, Hobbes positively values theatricality and theatrum mundi, as a social activity through which norms, a polity and laws can be constituted. Through theatrical mimetic dynamics, the citizens can continuously shape the norms of the society in which they live, the interpretations of laws, and influence the governing bureaucracy. While the anti-theatricality prejudice circulated, and theatres closed by law for a short period, English cultural traditions could be characterized as theatrical since the Middle Ages.143 Theatricality took on a special significance in the mid-seventeenth century because the rise of corporations or towns led to changing social structure. Contemporary scholars of Renaissance England argue that self-fashioning permeated the culture as it grappled with a changing social structure.144 Steven Mullaney for example, argues that the changing landscape of social relations in the emergence of towns and capitalism gave theater an especially intense role in social education, as a place to stage new social roles in order to explore the normative implications of emerging economic and social structures.145 Attention to the theatrical mimetic dynamics in Leviathan means that Hobbes can be considered a member of a number of thinkers in the tradition who are sensitive to the performative aspect of virtue as it relates to political power. Niccolo Machiavelli is the most direct of these precursors, with Chapter 18 of his famous book declaring that

143 Postlewait, “Theatricality and Anti-Theatricality in Renaissance London,” 92.
144 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations : The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, The New Historicism : Studies in Cultural Poetics ; 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 4.
145 Mullaney, “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage,” 77.

political power is the sum of the force of the performance. Leviathan, in my view, echoes the idea that political authority is founded through performance, from The Prince.146 The Horae Subsecivae debate in Hobbes scholarship is precisely a controversy over whether or not a Machiavellian style set of political analyses found in handwriting were
authored by Hobbes, or his pupil, presumably with some kind of recommendation by Hobbes as to which text his pupil ought to be imitating.147 Handwriting analysis aside,
the one known fact is that Hobbes was a reader of Machiavelli.148 Castiglione makes similar arguments about how social status depends on performance in his analysis of Baroque court politics. The Book of the Courtier, in my view, emphasizes that being is being seen, and that honor involves being known as honorable. Castiglione’s characterization of Baroque politics implies that without an audience, a social performance is useless because it does not establish one’s place in the hierarchy of closeness to the Prince.149 Whether the performance is successful in court life, depends on how the witnesses judge it. Castiglione dissolves natural superiority into virtuosity of performance in the Book of the Courtier. Hobbes’s emphasis on the way other’s judgments of his power and worthiness affect him, and the natural equality of the state of nature, are similar arguments, based around the idea that the character of social life is somehow a sum of the witnessed performances in it. The importance of

146 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Edited and Translated by David Wooton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1995), Ch.18.
147 Noel B. and Arlene W. Saxonhouse Reynolds, Hobbes and the Horae Subsecivae (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 7.
148 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 37.
149 Castiglione, Hoby, and Henderson, The Book of the Courtier. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier : The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Penn State Series in the History of the Book (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).  

acting in order to establish one’s place politically is the topic of Baldesaar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.150 In the English context there has been recent scholarship on “the social tropes of Elizabethan courtesy theory,” and the idea that books can teach social manners. These were guides that taught people how to belong to society by mastering the gestures of a specific social code. These early modern texts implied that aristocratic virtue was teachable and therefore not exclusively tied to land ownership, title, or bloodline. The non-natural character of aristocratic virtue, already explored in English literature, casts doubt on the reach of natural law in justifying social hierarchy.151 The Hobbesian general man first acts like an aristocrat in the Germanic warrior sense, pursuing his natural right or right to all things to the point of attempting to gain dominion over others. The general man has a Christian moment after life has become nasty brutish and short, he humbles himself in the realization of his lack of knowledge of causes and powerlessness to dominate everyone. Then the general man returns to an aristocratic performance this time in the guise of a person wearing the mask of someone who can take an oath to assume political obligations. The performative character of social life leads to discord in the state of nature. The covenanting moment is performative and ordering, but the question of social status is not worked out in any definitive way. In suggesting the transition from the anormative state of nature to the civil state is made on the basis of social performances, Hobbes follows the trend begun by Machiavelli and Castiglione in having the spectators of one’s social performance determine events.

150 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier : The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, 10, 11.
151 This means that the philosophical resources to question conservative interpretations of natural law, such as Warrender’s, have been around since the publication of Leviathan. Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford,: Clarendon Press, 1957). Jeff Dolven and Ebooks Corporation., Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege : The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

Leviathan does not tie the ability to appear capable of assuming political obligations to a natural status, as do traditional natural law theories. While social strata may still
develop in the Hobbesian commonwealth, especially since the citizens can compete for the honors awarded by the sovereign, Hobbes implies an egalitarianism of performance when each covenants with all. This makes sense to the extent that the function of the mutual performance is the constitutive power that founds the commonwealth. The mythical character of Leviathan, derives from its presentation of a plot in which a whole society would engage in a single social performance requiring everyone’s reciprocity. It is impressive in De Inventione when the just king suddenly arises in a state of nature, to wisely found a polity, and it is equally impressive when in Leviathan the multitude engages in a performance of mutual oath taking.152 Hobbes attributes a significant constitutive power through the imitative arts to the general man in the state of nature. There is no reason this power to constitute would not still be possible in the theater of the commonwealth. Sovereignty in the English imagination was already figured in terms of spectacle for both James I and Elizabeth. 153 In terms of cultural production, theatricality and theatrum mundi were central themes of the era’s illustrious dramatists. Ben Jonson, a friend of Hobbes, designed court masques, theatrical productions to entertain and honor the King.154

Leviathan was written in a culture appreciative

152 Cicero et al., “De Inventione.”
153 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power : Political Theater in the English Renaissance, A Quantum Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature : Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Susan Frye and ebrary Inc., Elizabeth I the Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage : License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

154 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.

Shakespeare, whose Jacques invokes theatrum mundi in As You Like It.155 Whether the Renaissance context is considered to be Leviathan’s place in a series of political treatises invoking theatricality, or the context of English political and social theatricality in general, in both the textual and empirical Renaissnace England, acting, spectating, and being spectated comprised social and political life.156 Hobbes is simply the first to say that the continuum of social contexts that performativity can create, ranges from a
battle of each against all to a mutual oath taking, to holding political offices in a relatively unified political body.

Leviathan is a classic of political knowledge because his appreciation for the effects of the language use. Language translates mental discourse into verbal, is a means of social disagreement, the tool to create normative consensus, the means of covenant, the command of law, and the character of rulership and obedience.157 Language is
related to what a man knows and his passionate makeup in before during and after his recognition and reversal.158 The observations about the power of mimetic language use range from English theater, to the humanistic study of Horace, to the standard for scientific writing.159 The value of theater for its educational purposes, and the ability of
texts to turn their readers into spectators in order to teach were emphasized by Petrarch, Castiglione, Pico della Mirandola, and Machiavelli among other writers.160

155 Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” II.viii, 415.
156 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning : From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture ; 44 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
157 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 25, 33, 102, 24, 47.
158 Ibid., 31, 120, 24.
159 West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 185. Dear, “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society.” Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. .
160 Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others.” Castiglione, Hoby, and Henderson, The Book of the Courtier. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kriesteller, and John Herman Randall, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Chicago Editons (Chicago,: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948). Machiavelli, The Prince.

This tradition emphasizes the salubrious ethical effects of spectacle, and the normative possibilities in the theatrical dynamic between actor and spectator, and between author and reader. The mimetic dynamics of citizenship means that the theatrical character of social life unifies the audience who is also the actor of the sovereign, similar to the way in which Renaissance theatre architecture brought audiences together, not simply to look at the actors or because the players are playing, but also to look at one another. Hobbes contributes Leviathan’s account of how the genesis of political obligation and political authority entails theatricality to this tradition.

Reading Leviathan from the perspective of mimesis

This dissertation recovers the “blind spot,” of Hobbes’s authorship of Leviathan, which is his own inability to reduce his account of the constitutive power of the future subject citizens to mechanistic force. The observation that it is mimesis, and not the mechanical movements of the human body that explains Hobbes’s approach to the question of know-how arises out of a critical perspective on the text. I am not arguing that Hobbes did not know what he was saying when he characterized social relations as
able to form a giant machinal man.161 Instead, I am arguing that what this Automaton means arises out of the citizen and readers responses to it. The readers and the general
men are its matter and its maker. What the Autonomaton is compared to is a bureaucracy, which is made up of performing actors rather than non-human matter. The general man participates in the constitution of the polity by knowing how to know himself in the sense that he has to respond to mimetic language use in order to participate in the formation of his society’s normative consensus.
161 Hobbes and Tuck, Leviathan, 9.

The poetic, linguistic, anthropological and theatrical dimensions of mimesis explain the force men can exert on one another that nevertheless does not deny agency.
Problems of know-how in transitioning from the state of nature to the civil state involve the question of how citizens create norms. In the typical reading of Leviathan, the
emphasis is placed on the passivity implied by the term avowal, rather than the theatrical context, and as a result, obedience is usually assumed to passive. The term
Leviathan alludes to the book of Job, which refers to alienation between God and man that Hobbes compares to the distance between the sovereign who imitates God and the people.162 The alienation suggested by this Biblical allusion coheres with the idea that the sovereign can dictate the meanings of terms used in public discourse. Attention to the theatrical mimesis at play in Leviathan lends a new perspective on agency in practices of citizenship. I argue that tracing the mimetic dynamics in Leviathan, means
obedience or avowal appears as a political practice, one that mediates the alienation between subject-citizens and the authority they create.