Creating the Commonwealth: Power, Projection and Religion in Hobbes’s Leviathan

Amy Chandran

This presentation investigates familiar difficulties surrounding the generation of the Commonwealth from out of the state of nature, and proposes a novel way of understanding Hobbes's solution. Building on recent explorations of power and projection, it argues that Leviathan proposes the concrete construction of a “Common Power.” Examination of Hobbes’s expanded account of natural religiosity in Leviathan suggests that projections of “power invisible” prompted by fear or hope may elicit acts of honor, despite the pervasive conditions of natural equality. If the “laws of honor” operate in the natural condition, this explains how and why individuals might constitute themselves as “instrumental powers” of an increasingly common entity by way of a free-gift of their will. Hobbes polemically suggests this free-gift is the “grace” or divine intervention required for salvific deliverance from the natural estate. This shows how power might be compounded to a singular site, such that the “Mortal God” instituted in the covenant can be understood to be a rational representation of omnipotence in history. 

Amy Chandran is an Assistant Professor in the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. She completed her PhD at Harvard University in 2023.