Educating the Body Politic: How Hobbes’s Civil Science Strengthens and Constrains the Sovereign

This article argues that the teaching of Leviathan's doctrine in the universities is meant to contribute to a language of politics within which the sovereign will be pressured to operate by procedural considerations. The sovereign's reach over citizens is attenuated by the apparatus of government, as Hobbes's first description of the Leviathan makes clear, and Hobbes expected the sovereign's ministers, suitably trained in his doctrine, to have a mediating effect on the sovereign's power. The sovereign's laws are to be enacted and enforced by ministers who have been educated in Hobbesian civil science and therefore expect that the sovereign will rule in accordance with that science. Even ordinary citizens will be familiar with the broad outlines of Hobbesian civil science and will notice when laws and policies fail to perform the business of the state. When Leviathan's doctrines are publicly taught, sovereignty is strengthened by a teaching so favorable to sovereign power, but it is also constrained insofar as those doctrines set expectations for how the ruler will exercise their power. It is not in acts of individual or collective resistance that the sovereign's commands are to be moderated in the direction of the common good, but through the expectations of subjects, and especially of those subjects who serve as ministers, set by sovereigns themselves through the public promulgation of Leviathan's doctrine.