Quotation
Last reviewed:
“By art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, which is but an artificial man.”
Thomas Hobbes · Political philosophy · Early modern · 1651
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the introduction as a picture of the state as a made man: sovereignty is an artificial soul, officers are joints, reward and punishment are nerves, and the whole is the work of art, meaning craft, not the work of nature. A rival reading hears a confession that the state is a monster, but Leviathan is his name for the remedy, the covenant that ends the war of all against all. The sentence opens the book. The famous misery of the state of nature comes later, as what this art is for.
Did Thomas Hobbes really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Hobbes's own English in the introduction to Leviathan. Art means human making, contrasted with God's making of the natural man. The commonwealth is artificial and still a person. The wording is secure.
Where it comes from
Leviathan, introduction
Approximate date: 1651.
How to use it
A new combined authority in Manchester, with a logo and a chief executive, is an artificial person in a thin modern sense, and Hobbes would ask where its soul, the sovereignty, actually sits. The logo is not the art he means. The art is the covenant that makes one will out of many; If nobody can say who decides when the departments conflict, the artificial man has not been assembled, however large the building is.
A mindset reading
Artificial, in this introduction, is a term of praise for human construction, not a slur meaning fake. People who love organic community sometimes use the sentence to despise institutions. He thinks the natural condition is the dangerous one, and the made man is the achievement; A rival reading that stops at the monster in the biblical name misses his redeployment of that name as the commonwealth.
Understand the philosophy
The key term is the artificial man, the commonwealth produced by art in imitation of nature's production of the human being. The introduction compares sovereignty to a soul and the covenants that make the body politic to God's fiat in creating man. Leviathan, 1651, is his English. The frontispiece shows the figure made of smaller people, which is the sentence in picture; Chapter 17 will say how the covenant generates that person.
- society
- power
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the introduction as a picture of the state as a made man: sovereignty is an artificial soul, officers are joints, reward and punishment are nerves, and the whole is the work of art, meaning craft, not the work of nature. A rival reading hears a confession that the state is a monster, but Leviathan is his name for the remedy, the covenant that ends the war of all against all. The sentence opens the book. The famous misery of the state of nature comes later, as what this art is for.
Did Thomas Hobbes really say this?
Well attested. Hobbes's own English in the introduction to Leviathan. Art means human making, contrasted with God's making of the natural man. The commonwealth is artificial and still a person. The wording is secure.
Which work is it in?
Leviathan, introduction Approximate date: 1651.