Hobbes's Concept of Representation—I*

Hanna Pitkin

American Political Science Review, 1964, vol. 58, issue 2, 328-340

Abstract: It is not customary to regard Thomas Hobbes as a theorist particularly concerned with representation. Hardly any of the traditional commentaries on his thought even acknowledge that he mentions the term; and the index to Molesworth's standard edition of Hobbes's English works contains no reference to it. But the fact is that representation plays a central role in the Leviathan; and Hobbes's analysis of the concept is among the most serious, systematic and challenging in the history of political philosophy. It is an analysis both temptingly plausible and, as I hope to show, peculiarly wrong. And the ways in which it is wrong are intimately related to what is most characteristic and peculiar in the Hobbesian political argument.

Date: 1964
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