Abstract/Description

This article uses Hobbes’s discussions of rebellions—what they are and how they are started—to illuminate what I refer to as his theory of political organizing, his views about the processes through which collective political agents can be created and structured. While there is perhaps no more famous representation of collective agency than the image of the sovereign commonwealth on the frontispiece to Leviathan, my argument is that the state was not the only mortal god in Hobbes’s thought. Throughout his career, Hobbes also frequently described rebellions as collective bodies that could also exercise tremendous power. I trace the changing ways Hobbes tried to understand rebellion as he moved from what I call the incipient states model of The Elements of Law and De Cive to the political monstrosity model of Leviathan and Behemoth. In the former model, rebellions have roughly the same organization structure as states, though their existence is contrary to law. In the latter model, rebellions are still collective agents, but unlike the sovereign state, which gains its power from the consent of individuals uniting themselves into a single entity, rebellions are created by joining other artificial persons and corporate agents into a single monstrous body. By drawing on popular 16th century ideas about monsters, Hobbes was able to portray this powerful form of political agency as dangerously unstable. Finally, I show how this image of rebellion as a monstrous, compound collective agent plays a crucial role in shaping Hobbes’s practical and strategic political advice. Simply put, Hobbes insisted that the sovereign must also be an organizer, someone with the power to reorganize the social relationships, collective agents, and political institutions from which rebellions emerge in order to reinforce, rather than undermine, sovereign authority.