Hobbes on Representation

In this article, Quentin Skinner challenges the view that Hobbes’ theory of representation is radically new. Skinner argues by contrast that a number of political writers had already put forward, at the beginning of the civil war, a fully-fledged theory of representative government, and that they used it as revolutionary weapon against the Stuart monarchy. Thus Hobbes’ theory of representation in Leviathan appears less as an absolute innovation paving the way to modernity than as a critical discussion of claims and arguments that stand for the Parliament’s power.