The Powers of the Audience in Hobbes's Leviathan

• In Event: Imagining Past and Future: Myth, Metaphor, Utopia

Abstract

Whereas much of the existing literature on the visual and theatrical aspects of Leviathan focuses on Hobbes’s frontispiece, the relationship between his writings on optics and his political philosophy, or his approach to representation, this paper highlights how audiences influence both the sovereign representative’s and the subject’s observations and judgments. Hobbes is concerned with how what the subjects see influences their behavior and, consequently, the body politic, but he is also particularly concerned by how the presence of fellow spectators affects the subjects’ judgments about what they see.
In order to retrieve Hobbes’s approach to political spectatorship, first I examine his theories of sense perception, particularly sight, and of the desire to be honored by others in society. Hobbes criticizes how supernatural beliefs, perpetuated by scholastics, the Catholic church, and other religious organizations, cause people to be more susceptible to the civically destabilizing ambitions of demagogic “false prophets,” who are themselves motivated by a desire for the attention of others. However, Hobbes also argues that a social psychological phenomenon exacerbates the fallibility of human sense perception: the power of a credulous audience to dampen our capacity to be skeptical of what we observe. Second, I show how Hobbes’s psychology of spectatorship undergirds his recommendation that the sovereign carefully manage what the subjects observe and with whom, including his arguments that all public gatherings should require state approval and that civic lessons should be imparted to subjects in weekly public assemblies. Third, I examine how his psychology of spectatorship also undergirds his criticisms of deliberative open assemblies and his support for government secrecy. I conclude by proposing that Hobbes offers relevant insights for contemporary democratic theory by illuminating how antidemocratic strategies constrain or deceive the “eyes of the people” (Green 2010).

Author

• Kristen R. Collins, Georgetown University