The Organized Body

Abstract

The title page of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is engraved with an image of the sovereign state as a body composed of a multiplicity of smaller human figures. The significance of this image for me here is that Leviathan is a pragmatic constitution of and for the material bodies of the people.¹ Leviathan is an assemblage of corporeal parts brought under a unified relation to constitute a greater, more powerful, corporate body. Its power is symbolized by its massive sword and crook, secular and sacred authority invested in one entity. The constitution of individuals into a greater force is affirmed by the detail of Leviathan’s head, presented as a single great ‘organ’. If Leviathan’s active power is constituted by the power of its elemental bodies, the intellect needed to guide that power is a multiplicity of embodied minds unified into one great mind. This thesis examines the two complementary movements involved in this constitutional process: how multiple bodies are organized into larger, more powerful ones, and how sensations impinging on those bodies become thought. This double movement I invoke by the term organization.

For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturell, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.

—Leviathan p. 81