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Cycles

Hobbes's Body PoliticsFrom Life to Accountability in Leviathan

By Meghan Robison

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Published 31 October 2026

About this book

Offers a radical reading of the connection between embodied life and the art of making the Commonwealth in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan

  • Revises Hobbes' Leviathan to emphasise the intertwined roles of life and accountability, challenging their separation in standard interpretations of Hobbes
  • Redefines Hobbes’s 'War of All against All' as a universal condition where individuals see others as potential enemies within a collective humanity
  • Describes accountability as an artificial and practical concept, emerging from collective agreements and maintained through the authority of a sovereign who enforces rules and punishes violations

Reconstructing the conceptual link between life and accountability, Meghan Robison presents a new account of political founding and obligation in Hobbes. Beginning from an interpretation of life as an idiosyncratic bodily motion – a motion of limbs that begins within a living body – she shows how the Commonwealth is instituted through our self‑legislated embodied practices of holding ourselves to mutually beneficial shared rules.

Reviews

Robison advances a striking reinterpretation of Hobbes grounded in a fresh reading of his concept of life. Against the standard materialist, mechanistic, individualistic readings of Hobbes, she builds on his description of life as self-instigated, a “motion of limbs that comes from within”. This insight underwrites a new kind of relational account of voluntary motion and a robust conception of agency and power, opening a genuinely original and promising path for rethinking Hobbes’s political theory.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Who’s Afraid of Thomas Hobbes?

Chapter 1. Homo Artificialis: Art, Life and the Body Politic in the Introduction to Leviathan
Chapter 2. Voluntary Motion: Self-directed Life
Chapter 3. Desire: Self-expressive Life
Chapter 4. The Power to Prosper
Chapter 5. The Natural Condition of Mankind
Chapter 6. Making Covenants of Peace
Chapter 7. Authorizing Persons

Notes
Bibliography

About the author

Meghan Robison

Meghan Robison is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Montclair State University. Her work focuses on early modern political thought, with particular attention to Thomas Hobbes. She examines how philosophical understandings of living embodiment shape the ways human beings establish relations of authority, obligation, and accountability in political and domestic domains. She has published articles in Scienza & Politica, Arendt Studies, Hypatia, and Hobbes Studies, and has contributed a chapter to The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy (2025).

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