Abstract

By now, it has become a commonplace to say that Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is a work of rigorous reasoning wrapped up in rhetorical turns of speech.1 In this paper, my intention is to unravel one of the most powerful metaphors of that work, the metaphor of the commonwealth as a person. First, I shall try to locate the precise point at which the metaphor is meant to operate. After that, I shall focus on the metaphor itself. The third section is devoted to an examination of the power effects of the metaphor.