¹ English Works, edited by SirMolesworth, William (London: Longmans, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1839–1845)Google Scholar, henceforth cited as E.W.

Karl Loewenstein goes so far as to call the principle of representation incompatible with the Hobbesian doctrine; Volk und Parlament (Munich: Dreimasken, 1922), p. 35Google Scholar. Among commentators on Hobbes, the importance of representation seems to have been noticed only by Tönnies, Ferdinand in his Thomas Hobbes (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns, 1925), p. 238Google Scholar, and by Tussman, Joseph in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, “The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes” (University of California, Berkeley, 1947), pp. 89–119Google Scholar. The related concept of the “person” does get some attention in the French literature. See Polin, Raymond, Politique et Philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), ch. xGoogle Scholar; Gadave, René, Thomas Hobbes (Toulouse: Ch. Marques, 1907), pp. 93–101Google Scholar; Landry, B., Hobbes (Paris, 1930), ch. xGoogle Scholar.

² The Elements of Law, completed in 1640, was not published until 1650. De Cive, completed in 1642, appeared first in Latin and was not published in English until 1651, the same year that the Leviathan appeared.

³ My approach thus leans heavily on the developments in modern philosophy variously referred to as “ordinary language philosophy,” “Oxford philosophy,” or “linguistic analysis.” I am particularly indebted to Stanley L. Cavell, who introduced me to it; see especially his “Must We Mean What We Say?”, Inquiry, Vol. 1 (1958), pp. 172–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The reader unfamiliar with these ideas may find the most useful introduction to them to be the work of Austin, J. L., particularly “A Plea for Excuses” and “Other Minds,” now collected in his Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961)Google Scholar. Behind ordinary language philosophy there looms, of course, the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly the Philosophical Investigations (New York, 1953)Google Scholar. But I had not read Wittgenstein when the bulk of this essay was written, and its spirit is more Auetinian than Wittgensteinian.

⁴ E.W., III, 147.

⁵ Tönnies, op. cit., pp. 238–9; Gadave, op. cit., p. 139.

⁶ E.W., III, 148.

⁷ Ibid., 538.

⁸ Ibid., 148.

⁹ Ibid., 149.

¹⁰ Ibid., 152.

¹¹ Hobbes's ambivalence on this point no doubt is related to his peculiar conception of rights, which in turn depends on the idea of the state of nature. (See Part II of this article.)

¹² E.W., III, 148.

¹³ Ibid., 151.

¹⁴ Ibid., 148.

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 149–50.

¹⁶ Warrender, Howard, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), p. 23Google Scholar.

¹⁷ E.W., III, 150.

¹⁸ Ibid., 149.

¹⁹ Ibid., 147.

²⁰ Ibid.; italics mine.

²¹ The concept of the self as an assumed “role” that we “play,” while evidently not entirely right, is most suggestive. Cf. Goffman's, Erving extraordinary study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh, 1958)Google Scholar. But, of course, we do not ordinarily play or represent ourselves; as Goffman's title suggests, it is at most a matter of presentation; and even then the self is neither totally distinct from its masks, nor entirely exhausted in them.

²² E.W., III, 148. Although no citation is given in the Leviathan, Hobbes uses the same quotation in his “Letter to Bishop Bramhall” (E.W., IV, 310); and there he attributes it to one of Cicero's letters to Atticus. I finally located the true where-abouts of the passage in II de Oratore 102.

²³ E.W., IV, 310.

²⁴ My argument here holds only if, in writing of the vulgar expression “he's not his own person,” Hobbes in fact had in mind “he's not his own man.” Otherwise there might conceivably have been a seventeenth century expression “he's not his own person,” which was defined by acting on someone else's authority, as Hobbes suggests. I have not found any evidence of such a usage. No such use of “person” is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary; it does, however, list “he's not his own man.” The earliest example of this expression dates from the fourteenth century, and it has been in use since then. Its meaning corresponds to the one I suggest, not that given by Hobbes. It seems to me extremely likely that Hobbes in fact had in mind “he's not his own man,” and was again misled about it by his authorization definition.

²⁵ “Author” derives, after all, from the Latin “augere,” “to make something grow.” The connection is noted by Pinney, Harvey, “Government—By Whose Consent?” Social Science, Vol. 13 (October 1938), p. 297Google Scholar. It has recently been given full significance and development by Arendt, Hannah, in “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Future (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1963)Google Scholar.

²⁶ He knows, that is, how to use the word. But, like the rest of us, he may go wrong when he tries to say explicitly what it means.

²⁷ Of the Law of Nature and Nations, translated by Kennett, Basil (London, 1729)Google Scholar. But Pufendorf tries, for example, to avoid Hobbes's difficulties about representing incompetents; Bk. I, ch. I, sec. XII.

²⁸ “Unter Repräsentation wird primär der … erörterte Tatbestand verstanden: dass das Handeln bestimmter Verbandszugehöriger (Vertreter) den übrigen zugerechnet wird oder von ihnen gegen sich als ‘legitim’ geschehen und für sie verbindlich gelten gelassen werden soil und tatsächlich wird.” Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1956), I, 171Google Scholar. This work was written between 1911 and 1913. The translation of the passage is my own. There is an English translation available: The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, Talcott (Glencoe, 1947)Google Scholar. But the passages concerning representation are translated too loosely by Henderson and Parsons—at least, too loosely for my specialized interest. Where Weber implies only the ascription of actions, the translation often implies the ascription of normative consequences. (These terms are explained below; compare also Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, I, 25, 171–6, II, 438–40Google Scholar.)

²⁹ Political Power and the Governmental Process (University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 38Google Scholar. Loewenstein actually says “the legal essence,” but the context makes quite clear that he means this as a general definition, that without authority to bind others there is no “real” representation.

³⁰ “Problems of Representation in the Government of Private Groups,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 11 (August 1949), p. 566CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Sait, Edward McChesney, Political Institutions (New York, 1938), p. 476Google Scholar: representation “occurs whenever one person is authorized to act in place of others.”

SirBarker, Ernest, Greek Political Theory, p. 35Google Scholar, cited in Fairlie, John A., “The Nature of Political Representation,” this Review, Vol. 34 (April, June 1940), p. 459Google Scholar: “No body, even if directly elected, is really representative unless it has representative authority, or in other words, is entitled to deliberate and decide as the exponent of the general will within its sphere.”

Wolff, Hans J., Organschaft und Juristische Person, vol. II, Theorie der Verlretung (Berlin: Carl Heymanns, 1934), pp. 17–18Google Scholar: the representative is “eine Person, die als ‘Exponent’ einer Gruppe in Erscheinung tritt, deren Verhalten kennzeichnend ist für den ‘Geist’ dieser Gruppe, und aus deren Verhalten der Gruppe wohl auch Verpflichtungen oder Berechtigungen erwachsen. Der Repräsentant vertritt die Gruppe mit der Wirkung, dass sein Verhalten dieser ‘zugerechnet’ wird.”

SirLewis, George Cornwall, Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Some Political Terms (Oxford: James Thornton, 1877), pp. 97–104Google Scholar.

Plamenatz, John P., Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation (London: Oxford, 1938), pp. 4–20Google Scholar.

Tussman, op. cit., pp. 117–8. But cf. his more recent Obligation and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford, 1960), pp. 59–62Google Scholar, where a wider sense of representation seems to emerge.

Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 32–75Google Scholar.

³² In the brief confines of this article it is only possible to indicate the areas of weakness or failure of the Hobbesian definition. The task of examining alternative definitions, and relating each of them to its context and all of them to each other, I undertake in a book on representation I hope to publish soon.

³³ Griffiths, A. Phillips and Wollheim, Richard, “How Can One Person Represent Another?” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XXXIV (1960), 187–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 192–3.

³⁵ Ibid.