Thomas Hobbes remains a significant influence on contemporary reflections about the concept of political representation. Among his works, Leviathan (Hobbes, 1651) presents this concept most clearly and continues to resonate today.
The paradox of representation
The concept of representation itself contains a paradox. This paradox is reflected in the binomial presence and absence, since nothing can be absent and present at the same time. To represent means to bring back, to make present something that is absent. Representation cannot merely be a duplicate of the represented elements; there must be something pre-existing for a representative to represent. In Roman society, for instance, “to represent” meant to fulfill a promise, such as paying debts or delivering inheritances (Johnston, 2015: 203).
Representation also encompasses an aesthetic dimension. A skilled orator, for instance, can use speech to make an audience visualize images. In Leviathan (Hobbes, 1651), Hobbes illustrates this concept through pictorial representations, showing how certain names and designations can evoke a sense of representation for objects or ideas.
Until the late 14th and early 15th centuries, Latin was the primary language for writing in England. The vocabulary associated with representation was later translated directly from Latin into English. It wasn’t until the 17th century that members of the English parliament began to be referred to as “representatives.”
The parliament was a political institution where representatives gathered by the king’s authority. In this context, they were “representatives for the people” (assembled by the king, for the people) and not “representatives of the people” (not elected by the people). Hobbes argued that it was the sovereign, not the people, who had the power to legitimize parliament. He advocated for the idea of virtual representation of all citizens, not just those who elected the representatives.
An absolutist answer to a chaotic world
To better understand Hobbes’ political theory on representation, it is necessary to contextualize his writings with the remarkable events of his time. King Charles I had several disputes with the English Parliament before the start of the Civil War: from the dissolution of parliament in 1626, through the so-called “Eleven Years’ Tyranny” (1629-1640), during which the king ruled without parliament, to the moment when the presentation of the Nineteen Propositions (Constitution Society, n.d.) by parliament in 1642, essentially demanding the king cease ruling. In June 1642, Charles I responded to Parliament’s radical demands by conceding (Constitution Society, n.d.), much to Hobbes’ dismay. In Hobbes’ view, Charles I had erroneously become a delegate of the people—a position that would ultimately lead to his beheading years later.
Hobbes lived through this anarchic period of civil war. Consequently, he aimed to construct a political theory capable of providing a rational basis for an absolute state.
To defend his political theory, Hobbes cleverly co-opted the terminology of his opponents. One notable figure whose language he appropriated was the parliamentarian Henry Parker.
Parker argued that the king’s power derived from the people (Parker, 1642). According to Parker, authority results from a human choice to submit; the community’s consent is given through a conditional and fiduciary contract, consented to by the people, which the king is obliged to fulfill. However, with the continuous breaches of the contract and the government’s performance marked by corruption, the virtuous (kings) who were entrusted with the power to govern fell into disrepute and a mixed government system was demanded. In this sense, Parker defended parliamentarianism, considering parliament as a group of virtuous citizens who embody the entity called “the people.” In this way, parliament would never go against the people because it is the people themselves; it would never go against their interests. This resonates with modern conceptions of parliamentary democracy, where elected representatives are seen as the voice of a pluralistic electorate.
Hobbes opposed parliamentarianism by appealing for absolutism of any type, since any kind of power exercised by a sovereign that offers protection to the political community is legitimate. In his absolutist theory, it is necessary to see the state as a pre-legal corporation, as an inert machine that needs a driving force/principle, which, according to Hobbes, will be the principle of representation.
To better explain the principle of representation, Hobbes makes a distinction between the concepts of man and person, and a distinction between the concepts of natural persons and artificial persons.
In the etymological realm, Hobbes traces the word “person” to the Latin persona, meaning a disguise or mask, such as those used by actors on stage. Building on this origin, Hobbes defines a person as someone who represents their own actions or those of another, much like a theatrical performer. Moreover, man is not synonymous with a person; for a man to be a person, he must be responsible for his actions.
Hobbes also differentiates between the two types of persons. Natural persons are those who, in carrying out actions, raise questions of personality. For Hobbes, there are two types of natural persons: authors, who are the possessors of the actions and are responsible for them, but who delegate the right to carry them out to someone else; and actors, who carry out the actions on behalf of the authors. Artificial persons, on the other hand, are representatives who act on behalf of someone else through a mediator.
In Hobbes’ political theory, representation is a private representation kind. Those who authorize the representative are the disunited crowd, the individuals one by one who restrict their rights, giving power to a representative to unite all the individuals into an entity called the people. It is the unity of the representative that gives unity to the represented, as expressed in a Leviathan passage: ‘For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One’ (Hobbes, 1651: 101). Moreover, this unity is more effective if performed by a single person, as Hobbes states: ‘And Unity cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude’ (Hobbes, 1651: 101).
For Hobbes, the parliament should rest as a consultative body and under the authorization of the king and not the people (it is the king who has the authority to dissolve parliament). Therefore, the parliament represents the kingdom of England, but only for the purposes that the king wants. The sovereign must rule absolutely, being limited by God and therefore by natural law, as long as he ensures the protection of the people.
Building the political community
The process of building a political community takes place in the transition from the state of nature to the civil state.
In the anarchy of the state of nature, there is no body, but a world cohabited by a multitude of naturally equal and naturally rivalrous individuals, who have in common the fear of violent death and the sense of self-preservation. It is to guarantee self-preservation that the individuals enter into a contract with each other to create the sovereign. It follows that the sovereign does not contract with the individuals, but receives authority through a unilateral and free donation, incorporating the judgment of each individual. In this sense, fighting against the king would be like fighting against one’s own judgment.
With the transition to the civil state, the state becomes a machine and the sovereign its soul, and if the sovereign dies and is not replaced, the state dies and loses its driving force. It is therefore necessary to bear in mind that there are two bodies of the king: the physical body, which is subject to the inevitability of death; and the political body, which is passed down from father to son. In this sense, Hobbes’ theory presents itself as a legalistic theory, based on the rationalization of representation when rights are legally passed on, through a pre-existing contract, between the king and the heir to the crown.
To be viable, the state needs an entity, it has to be imagined and projected in a present and omnipotent image of power (an image so well represented by the biblical figure of the monstrous leviathan) that provokes fear and provides security. The concept of fear in Hobbes always followed him throughout his life (‘my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear’, in Hobbes, 1679: 86), and the figure of the leviathan would be a monster that would instill fear and fight monsters even more dangerous than it, such as civil war.
The Hobbesian state is an organism that maintains the security of the political community through the constant threat of coercion by a single sovereign who, by becoming the community’s theologian, through playing the role of mediator between God and the people, comes to concentrate not only political power but also religious power.
Room for critique
Various authors throughout history, from Pufendorf (Palladini, 2008: 27) to Karl Loewenstein (Pitkin, 1964: 35), have, even when diverging from Hobbes, echoed his emphasis on the intimate connection between the concepts of representation and authority. It is precisely in this very particular view of Hobbes, which links representation and authority, that some criticisms can be leveled, as Hanna Pitkin has done (Pitkin, 1964).
Considering that authority presupposes the right to carry out a certain act and to be responsible for carrying out that act, there is an incompatibility between this concept and that of representation in certain situations, for example, when a subordinate of a firm represents his boss at a business meeting, it means that, at that moment, the subordinate has the authority to negotiate but does not necessarily have authority over his boss.
Another possible criticism is to see the Hobbesian concept of representation as part of the “terminological game” (as seen in the concepts of author and actor) that Hobbes plays to contradict his parliamentarian opponents. In other words, through a concept dear to parliamentarians (and commonly associated with political regimes opposed to absolutism), such as the concept of representation, Hobbes defends absolutism, taking advantage of this concept and maneuvering it to cement his political theory.
The concept of representation must be seen as a fundamental part of the machine armored by various mechanisms that is Leviathan. It is through this concept that the conflicts caused by man’s nature, which is essentially made up of desires and aversions that lead to human actions in a competitive, anarchic and violent world, are resolved. In the Hobbesian social contract, made between men to create the sovereign, conflicts disappear when everyone authorizes their will to be fictitiously represented by one. This principle of unity, consented to by the multitude and based on a single representative, will ensure the peace that was so absent during the disorder and civil war period that Hobbes experienced throughout his life. Hobbes rationalizes his theory, never seeing the sovereign as a demi-god. However, the author creates a sovereign with such absolute authority that every individual believes the monarch’s power is greater than it actually is.
In today’s world, there is a growing decline in the number of full-fledged democracies and a rise of either autocratic regimes or illiberal democracies (Freedom House, 2024). Like in Hobbes’ England, several countries present nowadays an increasing appeal to feeble pluralist political solutions; and citizens are seduced by political leaders who concentrate power in their hands while promising to restore order and bring prosperity.
In Hobbes, the absolute sovereign is not a “natural” or inevitable political endpoint, but a rational construct designed to prevent the chaos of the state of nature. Motivated by fear and the instinct for self-preservation, individuals voluntarily surrender their rights through a social contract, not because absolutism is natural, but because unchecked liberty, in the absence of authority, breeds violence and disorder.
The rise of leaders promising order amid democratic backsliding echoes Hobbesian logic: when institutions falter, citizens may seek concentrated authority, not as an inevitability, but as a perceived necessity in times of fear and fragmentation. Hobbesian absolutism is not the direct outcome of populism, yet populist rhetoric often mirrors its logic: privileging order over pluralism. Hobbes thus provides a lens to understand how democracies may drift toward authoritarianism under perceived existential threats.
References
Constitution Society. (n.d.). Nineteen propositions made by both Houses of Parliament to the King, 1642. https://www.constitution.org/1-History/eng/nineteen_propositions_1642.html
Freedom House. (2024). Freedom in the World 2024: The mounting damage of flawed elections and armed conflict. Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan, or the matter, forme, & power of a common-wealth ecclesiasticall and civill. (R. Hay, Ed.). McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought. https://historyofeconomicthought.mcmaster.ca/hobbes/Leviathan.pdf
Hobbes, T. (1679). Vita carmine expressa. (W. Molesworth, Ed.). London.
https://books.google.pt/books?id=Z_JiAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA117&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Johnston, D. (2015). Succession. In D. Johnston (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law (pp. 199–212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palladini, F. (2008). Pufendorf disciple of Hobbes: The nature of man and the state of nature: The doctrine of socialitas. History of European Ideas, 34(1), 26–60.
Parker, H. (1642). Observations upon some of his Majesties late answers and expresses. Columbia University Libraries microfilm collection, FW Reel 252: E 153, no. 26.
Pitkin, H. (1964). Hobbes’s Concept of Representation—I. American Political Science Review, 58(2), 328–340.
David Pimenta is a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, where he is part of the Research Group on Regimes, Institutions, Governance, and Policies. He was a visiting researcher at the University Carlos III of Madrid, and his research interests include comparative politics, nationalism, and populism.
