Hobbes and the Healthy Sovereign

David Dyzenhaus

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Chapter 7 Hobbes and the Healthy Sovereign

In: Sovereignty

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David Dyzenhaus

David Dyzenhaus
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 167–191

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004218628_008

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Abstract

Chapter 29 of Hobbes’s Leviathan is devoted to ‘Of those things that Weaken, or tend to the dissolution of a Common-Wealth’. It contains a set of instructions to the would-be ‘Architect’ of a state as to how avoid erecting a ‘crasie building’, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity’. This chapter is a crucial moment of transition in the overall argument. It tells us that sovereignty is best understood along a continuum at one end of which there is the healthy sovereign, the artificial person of the Common-wealth or state. On Hobbes’s view, the state is an idea that can be made material only through being represented by a human individual or group of such individuals, who staff the office of sovereignty. It must follow that as the state sickens with the disorders he identifies, so the sovereign weakens, moving further along the continuum until the point where it ceases to be sovereign at all. Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty turns out to be not only much more nuanced than orthodox interpretations allow, but also of surprising contemporary relevance.

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Sovereignty

European and Global Histories, 1400–1800

Series: Intersections, Volume: 93

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004218628

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 11 Sep 2024

Subjects
- History
- International Law
  - Legal History

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Part 1 European Sovereignties

Part 2 Global Sovereignties

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Chapter 7 Hobbes and the Healthy Sovereign

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Sovereignty

European and Global Histories, 1400–1800

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