Pretenders of a Vile and Unmanly Disposition
Thomas Hobbes on the Fiction of Constituent Power
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6350754 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Adam Lindsay (0000-0002-9217-2453, University of Nottingham, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 475-499 |
| Publication date | 2019-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591718805979 |
| OpenAlex | W2897621078 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 11 |
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
Aesthetics · Epistemology · Identity (music · Interpretation (philosophy · Law and economics · Materialism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theory and Influence · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
The Scottish enlightenment and the militia issue
Elements of Law, Natural and Political
Three arenas of struggle
Publius and Political Imagination
Thomas Hobbes and the Constituent Power of the People
The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind
Sovereignty as Dominium? Reconstructing the Constructivist Roman Law Thesis1
The concept of constituent power
Agonistic democracy
Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power
Carl Schmitt's Political Theory of Representation
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2023 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |