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Mechanism and Hobbes Political Physiology of the Commonwealth 

Brendan Rome 

Philosophy 

I: Introduction: 

 The frontispiece of Leviathan depicts a giant, crowned man whose body is made up of a 

multitude of subjects towering over a pastoral landscape. This image not only serves as a 

powerful, iconic image that we associate with his opus centuries later, but is also the guiding 

analogy for Hobbes’ concept of the Commonwealth. Hobbes describes the frontispiece of 

Leviathan, “for by art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth, or State (in Latin 

Civitas), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for 

whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which sovereignty is an artificial soul, as 

giving life and motion to the whole body.”1 The guiding metaphor of the commonwealth in 

Hobbes is that of the leviathan, or artificial man. In this paper I argue that Hobbes’ political 

philosophy is a political physiology that draws directly on his iatromechanical view of 

organisms, or the mechanical model of animal life. I will first examine iatromechanical biology 

in the Epicurean turn in early-modern English philosophy. Then, I will explain Hobbes’ natural 

philosophy and his view of human nature. Finally, I will describe the construction of the artificial 

man, the role of personation in integrating the passions of subjects to the state’s will, and the 

mechanism of discipline that maintains it.  

II: Mechanism and the Early Modern Theory of Bodies: 

 Hobbes’ deeply intertwined natural philosophy and political theory arises amidst a milieu 

of mechanism in seventeenth century philosophy. The atomism and mechanism of Epicurus and 

Lucretius offered a heuristic that benefited the inquiries of natural and speculative philosophy. 



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Catherine Wilson writes, “the moderns valued the atomical philosophy less for its ability to calm 

fears and quell anxiety than what they saw as its practical implications, prizing it for its promise 

of works – medical, chemical, metallurgical.”2 Rather than adopting the complex, formal 

multiplicity of Aristotelian hylomorphism as the basis for scientific practice favored by the 

medieval Scholastics, many early modern philosophers instead favored the simple mechanical 

model of Epicurean atomism to ground scientific inquiry. Aristotle’s hylomorphic four causes, 

“being and essence…matter and subject…the source of the principle of motion,” and, “…what 

something is for, i.e. the good,”3 complicate inquiries into natural philosophy in a few ways that 

atomism avoids. First, matter and form are separated, while Atomism views forms as composites 

of atomic matter. Second, the principle of motion is an inquiry in-and-of-itself rather than being 

an element of an atomist theory of motion. Finally, Aristotle presupposes a telos, a purpose, end, 

or good of an object, a speculative inquiry that imbues bodies with normative significance. 

 On the other hand, atomism regards everything as bodies and void. Epicurus writes, 

“moreover, the totality is [made up of] ‘bodies and void’…beyond these two things [bodies and 

void] nothing can be conceived, either by a comprehensive grasp or analogously to things so 

grasped, [at least not if we mean] grasped as complete natures rather than what are termed 

properties or accidents of these two things.”4 Epicurus’ reduction of totality to atoms and void 

rejects the pluralism of Aristotle’s hylomorphic fourfold of things. Instead of separating matter 

from form, externalizing cause, and presupposing an “end” to an object, Epicurus offers a 

reductive universe of basic matter (atoms), which can form composites, and void, a lack of 

matter.  

 In The New Organon, Francis Bacon outlines principles of an empirical science that 

derives knowledge of nature from observation and experimentation of bodies and bodies alone. 



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His third aphorism states, “human knowledge and human power come to the same thing, because 

ignorance of cause frustrates effect. For nature is conquered only by obedience; and that which in 

thought is a cause is like a rule in practice.”5 For Bacon, science’s aim is to discover the cause of 

things, and this is achieved by active manipulation of nature to render it “obedient.” The 

mechanism underlying Bacon’s epistemology is clarified by his fourth aphorism, which states, 

“all men can do to achieve results is to bring natural bodies together and take them apart; Nature 

does the rest internally.”6 Bacon’s epistemology is the manipulation of effects through the 

alterations of bodies, either through combination or division. This approach produces effects 

which reveal the laws of cause and effect in nature. Bacon’s reductive epistemology reflects 

Epicurus’ reductive metaphysics of bodies and void. Wilson characterizes Bacon’s Epicurean 

leanings as “the sparse ontology of corpus inane.”7 The very sparseness of Bacon’s ontology of 

bodies and void renders objects simpler and clarifies the effects of observation and manipulation. 

This ontology prioritizes matter and its transformations over form. 

 The mechanism of physical atoms and bodies influences the natural philosophical view of 

anatomical bodies, both human and animal. Bacon likewise emphasizes the modifications of an 

anatomical body. He writes, “no one can endow a given body with a new nature or successfully 

and appropriately transmute it into a new body without possessing a good knowledge of 

modification or transformation of a body.”8 Bacon’s interventionist epistemology of observation 

and experimentation of a body’s modification extends to knowledge of anatomical bodies. Bacon 

continues, “therefore separation and dissolution of bodies is…achieved…with auxiliary 

experiments; and by comparison with other bodies, and the reduction to simple natures and their 

forms which assemble and unite in the compound.”9 A body’s compound nature and complexity 

compared to simple matter require a renewed attention to form, but not as a separate mode from 



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matter. For Bacon, anatomical study requires auxiliary experimentation, interventionist, but in a 

more subtle manner. In order to discover the nature of the compound body, one must discover 

the constituent parts that form it, their substance, and one body’s similarity and difference from 

another. Bacon’s view of bodies thus retains the Epicurean reduction of Aristotelian 

hylomorphism to atoms and void, but anatomical bodies are sufficiently complex to require 

“auxiliary experimentation.” 

 Bacon’s epistemic orientation to anatomy is reflected in the medical practice and 

biological study in the seventeenth century. In “The Epistemology of Biology,” the philosopher 

and historian of science Georges Canguilhem describes early modern biology as the study of life 

as mechanisms, albeit an imperfect one. He writes: 

One way of explaining how organs like the eye or organ systems like the heart and 

vessels work is to build what we would now call “mechanical models.” This is 

precisely what the iatromechanics (or iatromathematicians) of the seventeenth and 

eighteenth centuries tried to do in order to explain muscular contraction, digestion, 

and glandular secretion. Yet the laws of Galilean or Cartesian mechanics cannot by 

themselves explain the origin of coordinated organ systems, and such coordinated 

systems are precisely what one means by “life.”10 

According to Canguilhem, the mechanical model of organs was a dominant paradigm of the 

seventeenth century, borrowing from Galilean and Cartesian mechanics. Iatromechanics, or 

mechanics applied to medicine, considers organs to be machines, or, in other words composites 

with a given function. In other words, the body is thought to be a machine, that is made up of 

organs, which are smaller machines in turn. The life of an organism is maintained by mechanical 

organs working in concert. This paradigm, was incomplete however, as one cannot fully explain 

“life” through mechanical models. Hobbes supplements his mechanism with passions (albeit 

explained as movement), which Hobbes describes as the impetus of “voluntary motion.”11 

Hobbes’ descriptions of bodies are generally mechanistic, but he overcomes the shortcomings of 



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an iatromechanical paradigm of physiology with the passions to describe the affinity of living 

things for particular actions in order to secure food, safety, and other desirable things. 

III: Hobbes’ Human Bodies: 

 For Hobbes, the subject of science in general is a body. He writes, “the most general of 

the subjects of science is body, of which there are two accidents, magnitude and motion.”12 This 

is true of physical, biological, political, and celestial bodies, for example. All these bodies have a 

magnitude and a principle of motion. Types of bodies are distinguished by their magnitude and 

what causes their motion. 

 Thomas Hobbes’ human bodies are generally analyzed through an iatromechanical lens, 

as composites of organs, albeit motivated by passions. In Lessons From a Materialist Thinker: 

Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, Samantha Frost remarks that Hobbes’ materialism 

renders thought and voluntaristic action epiphenomenal to the material and mechanical processes 

of the human body. She writes, “what distinguishes Hobbes’ materialism, I think, is the manner 

in which the science of mechanism is used to explain or understand human behavior.”13 

According to Frost, Hobbes’ materialism is unique from Cartesian dualism and other early 

modern theories of human thought because it derives human thought, volition, and behavior from 

the body-as-machine. To understand Hobbes’ concept of the human body, it is necessary to 

understand both his iatromechanical concept of the physical body and his account of the 

passions. 

 Hobbes begins Leviathan with a description of nature as “the art whereby God hath made 

and governs the world,”14 and suggests that politics and the social construction of a 

commonwealth can model itself after God’s creation and governance of the world. He writes: 



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Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, 

as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. 

For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal 

part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves 

by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?15 

Hobbes embarks on his political treatise with an observation of nature, and human’s creative 

capacities as an extension of nature. Here, he defines life as a self-motivated “motion of limbs.” 

His formulation privileges the mechanical, self-propelled movement as the essence of life. This 

allows for both automata and the artificial man of the commonwealth to be considered an 

organism. Furthermore, with this question, Hobbes implies that the mechanical paradigm of life 

can offer us lessons in politics – a political physiology, so to speak. 

 Hobbes’ account of bodies, whether a body politic, a mechanical body, or a human or 

animal body is structurally the same. In “Five Bodies and a Sixth: Awareness in an Evolutionary 

Universe,” Robert E. Wood describes the Hobbesian body as a “reductionism…linked to a 

frequently accompanying thesis: universal mechanism. Bodies are explicable in terms of their 

component parts, and the combination of these parts is explicable through universal mechanical 

laws… Our self-direction as conscious agents is only apparent.”16 Wood’s commentary 

highlights Hobbes’ absolute mechanism and his emphasis on bodies as a rhetorical and empirical 

object. Hobbesian bodies are everywhere, in physics, biology, politics, and rhetoric, and they 

behave in roughly the same manner. 

 Wood critiques Hobbes’ bodies as denigrating consciousness, and while that is true to 

some extent, consciousness for Hobbes is motivating, but in a unique, mechanical manner. For 

Hobbes, things commonly associated with an immaterial consciousness or spirit, such as thought, 

volition, and affect are mechanical phenomena. In Leviathan, Hobbes divides thoughts into two 

categories: the unguided and the regulated. Unguided thought is similar to a dream and 



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“inconstant, wherein there is no passionate thought to govern and direct those that follow to 

itself.”17 Unguided thought is a passing thing and does not produce definitive effects. On the 

other hand, regulated thought is guided by desire and possibility of our modifications in the 

world. Hobbes writes, “the train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds: one, when of an effect 

imagined, we seek the causes, or the means that produce it; and this is common to man and beast. 

The other is when, imagining anything whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can by it 

be produced; that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when we have it.”18 For Hobbes, 

guided thoughts are integrated into cause of effect, and the organism who thinks of a desired 

effect. For example, when I am hungry, I think to cook or order a meal. While an animal thinks 

of eating tout court, I am able to contemplate many possible ways of eating and preparing a 

meal, such as making a taco or a stir fry. Thoughts guide us in satisfying our passions and 

dispositions. 

 For Hobbes, passions and dispositions play a central role in providing a cause for human 

action and desire, and thus establishes the drive for composition of multiple humans into a 

commonwealth. True to his mechanistic concept in life, Hobbes characterizes passions as 

motions, the self-caused and self-motivated movement of animals. He writes:  

There be in animals to sorts of motions peculiar to them: one called vital, begun in 

generation and continued without interruption through their whole life, such as are 

the course of the blood, the pulse, the breathing, the concoction, nutrition, 

excretion, &c, to which motions there needs no help of imagination; the other is 

animal motion, otherwise called voluntary motion, as to go, to speak, to move any 

of our limbs, in such manner as is first fancied in our minds. That sense is motion 

in the organs and interior parts of a man’s body, caused by the action of the things 

we see, hear, &c.19 

Here Hobbes identifies to motions unique to animals (humans included). The first is vital 

motions. These are continual, instinctual, and automatic. Vital motions happen throughout an 

animal’s life and are necessary to maintain the animal as a living being. These are self-motivated 



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yet are not voluntary. Voluntary motion on the other hand, does not happen continually and is in 

response to our passions. Some voluntary motions, such as eating or building shelter are 

necessary to maintain my life, but these do not have to happen as frequently as breathing or 

circulating blood. Whether essential, such as eating, or non-essential, such as speaking or 

dancing, my voluntary motions are motions in my body caused by things I see, hear, feel, or 

sense in any way. 

 Hobbes gives a detailed taxonomy of different passions, which run the gamut of love, 

hate, pleasure, pity, and cruelty, and many more. According to Frost, Hobbes’ emphasis on the 

passions and the mechanism of thinking-as-movement constitutes Hobbes’ theory of the thinking 

body. She writes, “when Hobbes depicts thinking as motions resonating between contiguous 

organs throughout the entire thinking-body, he provides us with the means to understand how 

one phantasm or idea may be related to another phantasm or idea.”20 Frost identifies that 

Hobbesian thinking is not situated entirely in the mind, or consciousness but is an effect of 

phantasms that act on the body. Therefore, thinking is, “metynomic,”21 a stand-in for embodied 

cognition. For example, when I think “it’s chilly; I should put on a sweater,” I am affected by the 

temperature in the air, and the wind, which I feel on my skin. The act of putting on a sweater 

would involve my arm muscles. Thus, thinking in a Hobbesian sense is embodied cognition.  

 In addition to rendering passions and thoughts material and machinic, Hobbes sees 

organs, acts, and the constituent parts of a human as relatively exchangeable. This is important in 

his concept of personation. In De Homine, Hobbes writes of the natural and artificial forms of 

face. He writes, “the Latins sometimes call man’s facies (face) or os (countenance), and 

sometimes his persona (mask): facies if they wished to indicate the true man, persona if an 

artificial one.”22 For Hobbes the multiplicity of faces in Latin shows that we are composites of 



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different mechanical organs that we exchange depending on our needs in the situation. The facies 

is the true face, useful for a human seeking to be honest, while persona allows us to exchange the 

authentic identity for an assumed one. He elaborates, “moreover, because the concept of a person 

is of use in civil affairs, it can be defined as follows: a person is he to whom the words and 

actions of men are attributed, either his own or another’s: if his own, the person is natural; if 

another’s it is artificial.”23 In addition to having multiple exchangeable faces, humans are 

exchangeable for one another. In civil affairs one attributes actions to a person, either naturally if 

one represents oneself or artificially if one personates for another. 

 In Leviathan, personation is the process by which one human can stand in for another. 

This is first established by a relative exchangeability of humans. Hobbes believes in the relative 

equality of humans in the state of nature. He writes, “nature has made men so equal in the 

faculties of body and mind…when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man 

is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which 

another may not pretend as well as he.”24 Hobbes does not claim an absolute equality between 

humans, but rather observes that humans, in spite of differences in strength and intelligence are 

relatively equal in power. He justifies this by identifying that the differences are indeed small 

enough, that anyone has the power to kill another in the state of nature.  

 Because one human can “stand-in” for another, one human can personate another human 

or a collectivity of humans. Hobbes describes personation as, “to act or represent, himself or 

another; and he that acteth another is said to bear his person or act in his name”25 Personation is a 

person’s acting on behalf, or representing another, an institution, or a multitude. In this way, the 

sovereign personates the commonwealth. Quentin Skinner describes Hobbes’ concept of a 

personating actor as, “The agent to whom the action is attributed must be represented by another 



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agent who can validly claim to be ‘personating’ the first by way of acting on their behalf.”26 

When one personates, one represents or acts on behalf of something represented. Hobbes 

constructs social composites in this way. A multitude can become a commonwealth if personated 

by a sovereign, but the sovereign must be singular. 

IV: Hobbes’ Body Politic: Personation and the Artificial Man: 

 Hobbes constructs the artificial man of the commonwealth through the sovereign’s 

personation of the multitude. Hobbes describes how a multitude is made one by personation:  

A multitude of men are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person 

represented so that it can be done with the consent of everyone of that multitude in 

particular. For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the representative 

that maketh the person one. And it is the representer that beareth the person, and 

but one person, and unity cannot otherwise be considered in multitude.27 

The composition of a multitude into a commonwealth is possible only when there is a sovereign 

who can personate a multitude she represents. The necessity of a commonwealth’s unity under a 

single sovereign illustrates Hobbes view that a body politic must be a unified organism. This is 

personated by a sovereign, but the commonwealth is made composite by the construction of an 

artificial man.  

 In Leviathan, Hobbes begins his opus of political theory with an account of the human. 

The complex composite of the commonwealth mirrors his view of the commonwealth as, “an 

artificial man…in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the 

whole body.”28 Hobbes’ rhetorical flourish in his introduction to Leviathan establishes two 

important things. First, the iatromechanical concept of life extends to political life, and as a 

consequence, the commonwealth is a constructed composite of its constituent citizens. Second, 

even though it is a composite, it requires a singular head: the sovereign who personates the state. 



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 The personation of the state requires the consent of the governed, whether given freely or 

coerced. Hobbes writes, “because the right of bearing the person of them all is given to him they 

make sovereign by covenant only of one to another, and not of him to any of them, there can 

happen no breach of covenant on the part of the sovereign; and consequently none of his 

subjects, by any pretense of forfeiture, can be freed from his subjection.”29 When the multitude 

enters a covenant under a sovereign it has no right of secession, rebellion or any escape from the 

covenant. Likewise, the sovereign is expected to uphold the covenant, but the sovereign forfeits 

little, if at all, in the compact that forestalls the state of civil war.  

The form and wording of the compact highlights the imbalance of the social contract 

where the citizen gives much more to the sovereign in exchange for safety. Hobbes writes, 

“every man should say to every man I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this 

man, or to this assembly of man, on this condition, that thou give up all right to him, and 

authorize all actions in like manner. This done the multitude so united in one person is called a 

Commonwealth.”30 In the formation of the commonwealth all citizens gives up their right of self-

governance to a sovereign (whether individual, such as a monarch, or a group, such as a 

legislature). The sovereign personates the commonwealth as a whole and enjoys the right of 

governance over the commonwealth’s citizens as long as the sovereign maintains the protection 

of the commonwealth. This inequality of rights in favor of the sovereign unifies the disparate 

passions of the multitude into a unified passion of the state, personated by the sovereign. Frost 

remarks, “if we examine this sovereign right to make some people’s power derive from and 

dependent upon the sovereign’s will and command…we can see how Hobbes’ materialist 

understanding of how paper is generated shapes the sovereign’s power.”31 There are two modes 

of power operative in Frost’s commentary on the Hobbesian sovereign. The first is potentia or a 



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body’s simple power or ability to perform a task. In order to streamline the state’s potentia into a 

cohesive body politic, the passions of each subject must be subjected to the sovereign’s passions 

on behalf of the state. The potestas, or authority of the sovereign maintains the discipline and 

regulation of the body politic’s potentia. The legitimacy of the sovereign justifies the sovereign’s 

power on behalf of the body politic, but the sovereign maintains this by right of coercion of their 

subjects. 

 There is a coercion implicit in the covenant that establishes the Leviathan. It is made in 

fear of a state of chaotic civil war. However, Hobbes asserts the validity of covenants made in 

fear. He writes, “covenants entered into by fear, in the condition of mere nature, are 

obligatory.”32 Once the multitude is organized into a covenant under the sovereign, even under 

fear, it has no recourse to freely leave the social contract. In his lecture Society Must Be 

Defended, Foucault comments that power relations constitute the multitude’s composition into 

the Leviathan. He states:  

Remember the schema of Leviathan. In this schema, the Leviathan, being no more 

than the coagulation of a certain number of distinct individualities that find 

themselves united by a certain number of the State’s constituent elements. But at 

the heart, or rather the head, of the State there is something that constitutes it as 

such, and that something is sovereignty, which Hobbes specifically describes as the 

soul of the Leviathan. Well, rather than raising the problem of the central soul, I 

think we should be trying – and this is what I have been trying to do – to study the 

multiple peripheral bodies, the bodies that are constituted as subjects by power-

effects.33 

As we have discussed earlier, Hobbes employs the legal-theatrical concept of personation to 

justify the sovereign’s representation of the commonwealth. Rather, Hobbes focuses on the 

metynomic place of the sovereign at the “head” of the commonwealth in an emphasis on what 

Foucault calls “the central soul.” The implicit violence and coercion in maintaining the artificial 

man of the commonwealth produces power-effects that regulate the subjects that compose the 



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commonwealth. In a sense the sovereign is the “reason” of the body of the artificial man, which 

regulates the passions of the elements of the commonwealth (i.e. the individual citizens, and the 

factions they compose such as class, political party, or religion). While Hobbes obscures the 

power relations that act on subjects, Foucault highlights them. In Hobbes’ the transformation of 

vicious pre-commonwealth humans into docile subjects is explained by an anthropogenic 

mytheme (i.e. the mythic story of the birth of humanity and human society). 

 The anthropogenic mytheme of the social contract both gives a provisional origin of the 

commonwealth and gives an account of a qualitative change in humans when they enter the 

compact of the commonwealth. Before the establishment, humans are in a state of nature, or a 

war of all against all. Hobbes writes, “hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without 

a common power to keep them all in aw, they are in that conditioned called war, and such a war 

is of every man against every man.”34 The state of nature is a state of war because each person’s 

passions are individuated, and humans come into conflict through competition and disagreement. 

This is in spite of humans’ desire for peace. Hobbes writes, “the passions that incline men to 

peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope 

by their industry to obtain them. And such reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon 

which men may be drawn to agreement.”35 Humans join into a compact, forming the 

commonwealth because humans tend toward war in nature, but desire peace. This is a 

composition of many into one in the “body politic” of the state and a transformation of disparate 

passions into one passion of the state.  

 This tension leads to a renunciation of our individuated passions when we enter into a 

commonwealth. Humans have natural right, which Hobbes defines as “the liberty each man has 

to use his own power, as we will himself, for the preservation of his own nature,”36 For the sake 



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of peace, humans renounce this natural right. Hobbes writes, “right is laid aside either by simply 

renouncing it or transferring it to another. By simply renouncing, when he cares not to whom the 

benefit thereof redoundeth. By transferring when he intendeth the benefit therof to some certain 

person or persons.”37 When a one renounces or transfers one’s right, it is a disavowal of the state 

of nature based on a desire for peace. The one who maintains the peace and is transferred the 

right ultimately is the sovereign. 

 While the mytheme Hobbes portrays is an originary renunciation, the sovereign’s 

enjoyment of rights over the commonwealth and direction of the passions is maintained by 

discipline (which is at once a regulatory and repressive function). Discipline regulates the 

passions of the subjects of the commonwealth into the sovereign and state’s interests. Foucault 

says, “so we have two series: the body-organism-discipline-institutions series, and the 

population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-state. An organic institutional set, or the 

organo-discipline of the institution, if you like, and, on the other hand, a biological and Statist 

set, or bioregulation by the State.”38 Foucault’s schema sets up a provisional opposition between 

the regulatory-mechanistic state, and the discipline-institution. He maintains that these 

oppositions are merely provisional and recognizes both are at work in a body politic. In Hobbes’ 

absolutist39 commonwealth, the ideological state apparatuses, such as religion must submit to the 

passions and will of the sovereign and the body-politic of the state. He warns against a confusion 

of religious sovereignty and temporal sovereignty, “temporal and spiritual government are but 

two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign.”40 

Nevertheless, so long as religion submits to the authority of the sovereign, it is an excellent 

disciplinary mechanism. 



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 Hobbes iatromechanical model of biology and metaphor of the artificial person of the 

state anticipate the findings of the French physiocrat Julien Offray de la Mettrie and his concept 

of the man-machine. This political physiology grounds the process where subjects are disciplined 

to align with the will of the sovereign and commonwealth. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault 

identifies the intimate link between iatromechanical biology and the enforcement of political 

norms. He writes, “La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine is both a materialist reduction of the soul 

and a general theory of dressage, at the center of which reigns the notion of ‘docility,’ which 

joins the analysable body to the manipulable body.”41 Foucault’s commentary on Julien Offray 

de la Mettrie reveals that a politics of discipline, and manipulability of the passions to a state’s 

designs can be derived from a materialist reduction of a human to a man-machine. La Mettrie 

himself writes, “let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine…the only philosophy that is 

relevant here, that of the human body.”42 La Mettrie’s proclamation is hauntingly close to 

Hobbes’ proclamation that “life is but a motion of limbs.”43 For Hobbes, both biology and 

politics is contingent on the mechanical nature of man, whether the natural biological human, or 

the artificial man of the commonwealth. We can conclude, then, that a sovereign and a state 

maintains its power, and peace, by manipulation of the movement and passions of its constituent 

parts, its citizens. 

 In his polemical Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt praises 

Hobbes iatromechanical political physiology as a powerful political theory of sovereignty. He 

writes:  

In Hobbes, the state is not in its entirety a person. The sovereign-representative 

person is only the soul of the “huge man” state. The process of mechanization is 

not, however, arrested but completed by this personification. This personalistic 

element too is drawn into the mechanization process and becomes absorbed by it. 

As a totality, the state is body and soul, a homo artificialis, and as such, a 



16 

 

machine…the leviathan becomes none other than a huge machine, a gigantic 

mechanism in the service of ensuring the physical protection of those governed.44 

In this passage, Schmitt identifies the very parallelism of machine-man and the state as artificial 

man. The mechanization and integration of subjects into an absolutist commonwealth is achieved 

by the sovereign’s personation of the state and direction and disciplining of its subjects’ 

passions. The state then become a totality, a giant, integrated mechanism that ostensibly protects 

those it governs and forms its constituent parts. The iatromechanical model of human physiology 

is the analogy and construction of the state and sovereign of guarantor of the commonwealth’s 

peace. 

V: Conclusion: 

 Hobbes’ Leviathan describes the commonwealth in terms of a political physiology, and 

describes the body politic as a literal composite of the bodies of the state’s subjects. It is 

absolutist in submitting the wills and passions of its constituent subjects to the will of the 

sovereign personating the state. In “Body Politic, Bodies Impolitic,” Charles Mills describes this 

transformation of the subjects as the reshaping of the subjects in building the commonwealth. He 

writes, “the human beings who inhabit this society, the homunculi of LEVIATHAN, will 

themselves be fundamentally reshaped by this shaping.”45 Hobbes views this transformation as a 

renunciation and transferal of right to the sovereign in exchange for peace, but this description 

belies the power of discipline the sovereign must exert on subjects to shape their passions for the 

commonwealth’s designs. In the construction of an artificial man, there is a reconstruction of the 

human.   



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Works Cited:  

Aristotle, “Physics.” Ed. Cohen, S. Marc, Patricia Curd, and C.D.C. Reeve. Readings in Ancient 

Greek Philosophy From Thales to Aristotle. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 

2011. 

Bacon, Francis, The New Organon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 

Canguilhem, Georges, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, “The Epistemology of Biology,” A 

Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings From Georges Canguilhem. New York, NY: Zone Books, 

2000. 

Epicurus, translated by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson “Letter to Herodotus,” The Epicurus 

Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 

1994. 

Foucault, Michel, translated by Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 

New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994. 

Foucault, Michel, translated by David Macey. “Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures at the 

Collège de France 1975-1976. New York, NY: Picador, 2003. 

Frost, Samantha. Lessons From a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and 

Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2008. 

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Endnotes: 

 
1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1994), 3. 
2 Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. 
3 Aristotle, “Physics,” Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 

2011), 983a. 
4 Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus,” The Epicurus Reader (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 

1994), 6-7. 
5 Francis Bacon, The New Organon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33. 
6 Ibid, 33. 
7 Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, 22. 
8 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, 107. 
9 Ibid, 108. 
10 Georges Canguilhem, “The Epistemology of Biology,” A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings From Georges 

Canguilhem (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2000), 78 
11 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 27. 
12 Ibid, 49. 
13 Samantha Frost, Lessons From a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford, 

CA: Stanford University Press: 2008), 21. 
14 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 3. 
15 Ibid, 3. 
16 Robert E. Wood, “Five Bodies and a Sixth: Awareness in an Evolutionary Universe,” The True, The Beautiful, 

and the Good (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 313. 
17 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 12. 
18 Ibid, 13. 
19 Ibid, 27. 
20 Samantha Frost, Lessons From a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 47. 
21 Ibid, 47. 
22 Thomas Hobbes, “On Man,” Man and Citizen (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), 83. 
23 Ibid, 83. 
24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 74. 
25 Ibid, 101. 
26 Quentin Skinner, “The Purely Artificial Person of the State,” Visions of Politics III: Hobbes and Civil Science 

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.), 179. 
27 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 104. 
28 Ibid, 3. 
29 Ibid, 111. 
30 Ibid, 103. 
31 Samantha Frost, Lessons From a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, 162. 
32 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 86. 
33 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures From the Collège de France 1975-1976, 29. 
34 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 76. 
35 Ibid, 78. 
36 Ibid, 79. 
37 Ibid, 81. 
38 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures From the Collège de France 1975-1976 (New York, 

NY: Picador, 2003), 29. 
39 Absolutism refers to a form of monarchical governance that came about in the 17th century, wherein a single, 

absolute monarch has complete control of the state apparatus without deliberative interventions of a parliament, 

feudal hierarchy, or electoral process. 
40 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 316. 
41 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), 136. 



19 

 

 
42 Julien Offray de la Mettrie, “Machine Man,” The Machine Man and Other Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 

University Press, 1996), 39. 
43 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 3. 
44 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 

2008), 34-35. 
45 Charles Mills, “Body Politic, Bodies Impolitic,” Social Research: Volume 78. No. 2: The Body and the State: How 

the State Controls and Protects the Body Part I, 589.