ABSTRACT This article aspires to make two original contributions to the vast literature on Hobbes’s account of the nature and person of the commonwealth: (1) I provide the first systematic analysis of his changing conception of ‘person’; and (2) use it to show that those who claim that the Hobbesian commonwealth is created by personation by fiction misconstrue his theory of the state. Whereas Elements/de Cive advance a metaphysics-based distinction between individuals (‘natural persons’) and corporations (‘civil persons’), from Leviathan onwards (...) Hobbes contrasts individuals acting in their own name (‘natural persons’) with representatives (‘artificial persons’). These changes notwithstanding, Hobbes retains the same corporate conception of the state throughout. On the prevailing ‘fictionalist’ interpretation, the sovereign brings the commonwealth into existence by representing it. I argue, rather, that as an incorporation of natural persons, the commonwealth becomes one person through the authorized (i.e. non-fictitious) representation of each constituent member singly by one common representative (‘the sovereign’). (shrink)

The paper examines Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the state and representation in light of the historical development of the idea of the people as a corporation and its use in late-medieval and early-modern theories of resistance. Consequently, it is argued that Hobbes’s use of a corporate metaphor for the state embodied a rejection of the ius gentium reading of the people as a corporate body that legitimised the right of resistance to the sovereign power. By incorporating the state, not the (...) people, and championing a single covenant of a dissociated multitude that leads to its generation, Hobbes undermined the basis on which advocates of popular sovereignty justified opposition to the sovereign; a prerogative derived in their eyes from a covenant between the people and the ruler. (shrink)

Nuestro interés en el presente trabajo es, efectivamente, enfocarnos en la temática de las corporaciones, pero centrándonos en dos autores en particular: Thomas Hobbes y Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Como se verá, mientras que Hobbes referirá a las corporaciones como empresas, Hegel las aludirá como asociaciones (encargadas de anexar la sociedad civil con el Estado). Es a estos fines que estructuraremos el presente trabajo en tres tiempos. En primer lugar, explicaremos cómo las corporaciones surgen de acuerdo a las teorías de (...) ambos autores. Luego elucidaremos la forma en que las mismas funcionan y se encuentran conformadas. Finalmente, en tercera instancia dilucidaremos la relación que las corporaciones mantienen con el Estado tanto en Hobbes como en Hegel. (shrink)