The Undocile Body of the Leviathan. Notes on Democracy in Thomas Hobbes

The conceptual distinctions proposed by Thomas Hobbes reflect the political problem of considering the multiple in unity or the convergence of innumerable bodies, desires and passions in the consolidation of a unitary sovereign will. Examples of this are the notions of potentiae (potencies) and potestas (power), together with others such as multitude and people or subjects and sovereign. All of them reflect the problem of the stability of the State and its institutional legitimacy: the need to generate, in a continuous way, a common power. To formulate a democratic reading, the purpose of this paper is to relate an iconographic reading of the frontispiece of the Leviathan to the presence/ absence of an indomitable body. The paper concludes that an essential feature of Hobbesian political theory is the sense of the democratic based on the inescapable presence of collective bodies that must be represented.