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“Pretenders of a vile and unmanly disposition”: Thomas Hobbes on the fiction of constituent power

Lindsay, Adam

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Authors

ADAM LINDSAY ADAM.LINDSAY3@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Assistant Professor in Politics



Abstract

The prevailing interpretation of constituent power is taken to be the extra-institutional capacity of a group, typically ‘the people’, to establish or revise the basic constitutional conditions of a state. Among many contemporary democratic theorists, this is understood as a collective capacity for innovation. This paper excavates an alternative perspective from constituent power’s genealogy. I argue that constituent power is not a creative material power, but is a type of political claim that shapes the collective rights, responsibilities and identity of ‘the people’. I do so by recovering Thomas Hobbes’s intervention into debates over constituent power among Scottish Presbyterians during the English Civil War. Though a materialist, Hobbes appreciated the centrality of the imagination to politics, and he argued that constituent power was one such phantasm of the mind. In Leviathan, he showed constituent power not to be a material power, but a world-making fiction that furnished political realities with ornamentation of the imagination, which might provide the beliefs and justifications to serve any number of political ends. More generally, the retrieval of a Hobbesian constituent power provides an important challenge to contemporary theories by demonstrating how partisan constructions of constituent power shape the political options available to groups.

Citation

Lindsay, A. (2018). “Pretenders of a vile and unmanly disposition”: Thomas Hobbes on the fiction of constituent power. Political Theory, 47(4), 475-499. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718805979

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 17, 2018
Online Publication Date Oct 20, 2018
Publication Date Oct 20, 2018
Deposit Date Oct 20, 2018
Publicly Available Date Oct 22, 2018
Journal Political Theory
Print ISSN 0090-5917
Electronic ISSN 1552-7476
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 47
Issue 4
Pages 475-499
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718805979
Keywords Thomas Hobbes; Constituent power; Imagination; The people; Representation; Democratic theory
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1177484
Publisher URL http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0090591718805979
Additional Information Copyright © 2018 by SAGE Publications
Contract Date Oct 20, 2018

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