Hobbes on Political Union and Authorization

This dissertation answers several persistent questions concerning what is perhaps the most philosophically influential defense of political absolutism: Thomas Hobbes’s account of political association as a union of wills in one person. The first set of questions concerns Hobbes’s argument for the rationality of union. I argue Hobbes’s argument rests upon a series of claims regarding the relative stability of constitutions mixing or dividing sovereign powers. Those claims, I show, rely upon a deeper psychological account of interpretive pluralism and disagreement, an account often misunderstood by commentators. Having considered why Hobbes regards union as rationally necessary, the dissertation turns to questions concerning Hobbes’s descriptions of union and its consequences. In all of his political works, Hobbes describes union as the creation of a covenant. However, commentators have disagreed about the nature of that covenant and whether it successfully brings about the kind of union Hobbes claims is necessary for political order. I argue it does. In particular, I challenge the conventional reading of Hobbes as abandoning the alienation covenant in his earlier works for the authorization covenant in Leviathan. I argue Hobbes always regards the earlier versions of the covenant as adequate for instituting union. Moreover, I show the addition of authorization language in Leviathan’s covenant amounts to an attempt to engage parliamentarian arguments rather than an abandonment of the earlier versions of the covenant. The result, I argue, is an account of union less problematic than usually supposed.