Leviathan

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Core Ideas

The Social Contract as a Real Unity

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Core Ideas The Social Contract as a Real Unity

Hobbes describes the covenant, or social contract, as a “real unity” among the multitude of natural men who have chosen to escape the state of nature. But Hobbes also says that this “multitude is not One, but Many; they cannot be understood for one. In order to understand Hobbes’s claim that the covenant is a “real unity,” Hobbes writes that “A Multitude of men, are made of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented. . . . For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One.” Although the multitude of natural men are not a unity, they create a covenant representing their unity called the Leviathan.

The Leviathan is an “artificial man,” an artificial “Person” or “Representer,” because it stands for the multiple wills of natural men as well as mimicking, or representing, the body of a natural man. Leviathan’s body is composed of the bodies of the multitude: these lesser bodies are the bits of matter (analogous to the bits of matter that make up a body of a natural man) whose movement causes the Leviathanic body to function. Thus, each natural man, each natural body, is separate and can never be unified with the multitude, a larger artificial body signifying all-natural men, literally embodying their unity as a sum of individual bodies. The Leviathan is a unity representing the multitude.

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