What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner

Runciman, David

doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00102

Cited by 114 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…Not only can a bridge not authorize its own representative, but it also cannot recognize its representative as such, and so others must recognize the bridge's representative. In this respect, Hobbes sees representation by fi ction as an ongoing process in which citizen witnesses, as the audience of representation, imaginatively construct a relationship between representatives and those they represent (Runciman, 2000;Skinner, 1999;Brito Vieira, 2009: 143-144, 248-253). Slightly revising Saward's (2010) framework, we might say that representation by fi ction involves an owner who authorizes an actor to stand for a person by fi ction, which is related to a referent (the entity that cannot authorize its own representative), before an audience.…”

Section: State Multitude Sovereign Authorizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speaking for Nature: Hobbes, Latour, and the Democratic Representation of Nonhumans

Brown

2017

S&TS

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Environmental theorists have often considered how best to represent nature's interests. This essay develops an approach to the democratic representation of nonhuman nature by examining the relation between Bruno Latour's account of representation and that of Thomas Hobbes. Both Hobbes and Latour develop a constructivist theory of representation as an ongoing process that partly constitutes what it represents. In this respect, Latour's account complements the constructivist turn in recent democratic theory, and it suggests a promising avenue for representing nonhumans. However, Latour also follows Hobbes in viewing representation as a matter of unifying and replacing the represented. This aspect of Latour's approach obscures certain key features of representative democracy in pluralist societies. The last part of the essay takes up an aspect of Hobbes's theory neglected by Latour, the notion of representation by fi ction, which suggests a way of representing nonhumans that off ers more support for representative democracy than other approaches.

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Section: State Multitude Sovereign Authorizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speaking for Nature: Hobbes, Latour, and the Democratic Representation of Nonhumans

Brown

2017

S&TS

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“…There is a learned debate about whether the Common-wealth, in addition to being artificial, is also to be classed as represented 'by fiction' according to Hobbes' schema. Two leading contributions to this debate are Quentin Skinner (Skinner 1999), who maintains that the common wealth is artificial but not fictional, and David Runciman (Runciman 2000) who maintains it must be understood as fictional.…”

Section: Hobbes: Of Persons Authors and Things Personatedmentioning

confidence: 99%

An audience with … the public, the representative, the sovereign

Milanese

2017

Filoz drus

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The right of audience, in common law, is the right of a lawyer to represent a client in a court. Royalty, the Pope and some Presidents grant audiences. What does the power to grant an audience consist in? And what does it mean to demand an audience (with)? Through a reading of the way in which the vocabulary of theatre, acting and audience is involved in the generation of a theory of state by Hobbes and Rousseau, this paper looks to reopen these questions as a political resource for us to re-imagine and refigure our ways of being together. Through readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, it looks at the ways in which the performance of politics creates the public, the representative and the sovereign and the ways these figures interact. It proposes an alternative role for theatre as places of affective learning and a civic ethics of playfulness, in which the auto-institution of the state as an imagined collectivity is fully assumed.

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“…There is nothing metaphorical about France's debts and treaty obligations. Hobbes considers states to be fictional artificial persons (Runciman, 2000;Skinner, 2007), much like hospitals and Roman gods:…”

Section: Back To Hobbes: the Attributive Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What makes a person fictional is not that it does not truly exist, but that it does not truly perform or authorize the actions that are attributed to it (Runciman, 2000). We could call states 'incapable' or 'passive' artificial persons to express the same point.…”

Section: Back To Hobbes: the Attributive Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial persons and attributed actions: How to interpret action-sentences about states

Fleming

2016

European Journal of International Relations

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Action-sentences about states, such as 'North Korea conducted a nuclear test', are ubiquitous in discourse about international relations. Although there has been a great deal of debate in IR about whether states are agents or actors, the question of how to interpret action-sentences about states has been treated as secondary or epiphenomenal. This article focuses on our practices of speaking and writing about the state rather than the ontology of the state. It uses Hobbes' theory of attributed action to develop a typology of action-sentences and to analyze action-sentences about states. These sentences are not shorthand for action-sentences about individuals, as proponents of the metaphorical interpretation suggest. Nor do they describe the actions of singular agents, as proponents of the literal interpretation suggest. The central argument is that action-sentences about states are 'attributive', much like sentences about principals who act vicariously through agents: they identify the 'owners' of actions-the entities that are responsible for them-rather than the agents that perform the actions. Our practice of ascribing actions to states is not merely figurative, but nor does it presuppose that states are corporate agents. Sean Fleming. "Artificial Persons and Attributed Actions: How to Interpret Action-Sentences about States." Forthcoming in the European Journal of International Relations. 6 his semantic claim that 'it is never right to speak of states acting' and that the common tendency to do so is 'a misleading habit' (2005: 355n, emphasis in original; 2014: 39, 71-74). Lomas argues that action-sentences about states are pernicious metaphors that can and ought to be eliminated from our discourse: 'Scientists induce chemical changes; bus drivers drive buses; governments govern us. States do nothing. We have no need of a verb for them' (2014: 39). Marks (2011: 16) agrees with Lomas that ascribing actions to states is a metaphor, but he sees it as a benign one: 'the metaphor [of state agency] is useful

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What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner

Cited by 114 publications

References 0 publications

Speaking for Nature: Hobbes, Latour, and the Democratic Representation of Nonhumans

Speaking for Nature: Hobbes, Latour, and the Democratic Representation of Nonhumans

An audience with … the public, the representative, the sovereign

Artificial persons and attributed actions: How to interpret action-sentences about states

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