Name: Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan
Author: Thomas Hobbes

The frontispiece presents sovereignty as a kind of political map. Above a bird’s-eye view of an idealised European city state rises a gigantic crowned figure, his body composed of hundreds of smaller human bodies, all turned towards him in allegiance. The image translates Hobbes’s theory of representation into visual form: the people become one person only when they are represented by a single sovereign authority. The city below, with its church spire, walls, streets and open square, is not merely scenery but the ordered civic world made possible by that act of political submission.

Hobbes appropriates the Leviathan of the Old Testament – the mighty sea monster described in the Book of Job – as an emblem of unified secular and ecclesiastical power. The sovereign holds the sword in one hand and the crosier in the other, signifying his command over both state and church. This dual authority is echoed in the paired columns of images below: on the left, the instruments of temporal power, including castle, crown, cannon, arms and battlefield; on the right, their spiritual equivalents, including church, mitre, excommunication, scholastic logic and ecclesiastical courts.  The design insists that peace depends on the concentration of these rival powers in a single representative body.

The frontispiece thus makes visible one of Leviathan’s central claims: 

'A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One […] And if the Representative consist of many men, the voyce of the greater number, must be considered as the voyce of them all.' (Leviathan, Part 1, chapter 16).

Ex Carta

The famous frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan, designed by Abraham Bosse, depicts the sovereign as a vast human amalgamation of the body politic. The city and landscape below form a symbolic cartography of order, uniting civil and ecclesiastical estates under the benign oversight of one ruler.

 (1651), by the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), remains one of the defining works of modern political philosophy. Written while Hobbes was living in Paris, in the aftermath of the English Civil War and the collapse of royal authority, it is sometimes mischaracterised as a straightforward apologia for absolute monarchy. In fact, Hobbes presents monarchy as only one possible form of the strong, undivided sovereignty he believed necessary to rescue human beings from civil war, insecurity, and mutual violence.

 Hobbes presents civil society as an artificial construction: a collective act of self-preservation by which individuals escape the violence and insecurity of the natural condition, famously described by him as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. To avoid this state of war, the multitude authorises a sovereign power to act in its name. The resulting ‘commonwealth’ is therefore both made by the people and set above them. Hobbes’s argument is given its most memorable visual form in the striking frontispiece to the first edition, designed by the French artist Abraham Bosse (c.1604–1676) in collaboration with the author.

 Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), Philosopher’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2010, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/13400.

Influenced by the turmoil of the English Civil War, Hobbes developed his theory that only a strong and absolute sovereign could sustain peace. For this he appropriates the sea monster of the Old Testament as a unifying sovereign of church and state, towering over a birds’-eye view or ‘map’ of an idealized European city state, replete with church spire, city walls, and town square. The sovereign sea monster wields the symbols of both state and church, the sword and crosier, reflected in the frame below: earthly power on the left, and the powers of the church on the right; castle to church, crown to mitre, cannon to excommunication, weapons to logic, and the battlefield to the religious courts.

The sovereign sea monster’s body and arms are made up of the bodies of hundreds of people, all turning to look at him in allegiance, illustrating Hobbes’s argument that: ‘A multitude of men, are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular. For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one … And if the representative consist of many men, the voyce of the greater number, must be considered as the voyce of them all’ (