Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:35:41.617Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2021

Joanne Boucher
Joanne Boucher*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
*
Corresponding author. [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan is justly renowned as a powerful visual advertisement for his political philosophy. Consequently, its rich imagery has been the subject of extensive scholarly commentary. Surprisingly, then, its gendered dimensions have received relatively limited attention. This essay explores this neglected facet of the frontispiece. I argue that the image initially appears to present a hypermasculine sovereign. However, upon closer inspection, and considered alongside Hobbes's economic theory, it yields to a reading of the sovereign as an ambiguously gendered figure. Reading the frontispiece through the prism of gender and the economy reveals not a static image of unwavering male power but rather one of an equivocally-sexed creature teeming with life, contradictions, and complexities worthy of continued examination.

Type
Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Fall 2021 , pp. 636 - 656
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bray, Michael. 2007. Macpherson restored?: Hobbes and the question of social origins. History of Political Thought 28 (1): 56–90.Google Scholar
Bredekamp, Horst. 2007. Thomas Hobbes's visual strategies. In The Cambridge companion to Hobbes's Leviathan, ed. Springborg, Patricia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Breitenberg, Mark. 1993. Anxious masculinity: Sexual jealousy in early modern England. Feminist Studies 19 (2): 377–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carver, Terrell. 2004. Men in political theory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Carmichael, D. J. C. 1983. C. B. Macperson's “Hobbes”: A critique. Canadian Journal of Political Science 16 (1): 61–80.10.1017/S0008423900028006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christensen, Paul P. 1989. Hobbes and the physiological origins of economic science. History of Political Economy 21 (4): 698–709.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett, Margery, and Lightbown, R. W.. 1979. The comely frontispiece: The emblematic title-page in England 1550–1660. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Coole, Diana. 1988. Women in political society. Sussex, UK: Wheatsheaf Books.Google Scholar
Crawford, Patricia. 2014. Blood, bodies and families in early modern England. New York: Routledge Press.Google Scholar
Di Stefano, Christine. 1991. Configurations of masculinity: A feminist perspective on modern political theory. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, Will. 2001. The renaissance beard: Masculinity in early modern England. Renaissance Quarterly 54 (1): 155–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frost, Samantha. 2008. Lessons from a materialist thinker. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, M. M. 1981. Picturing Hobbes's politics? The illustrations to Philosophicall Rudiments. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44: 232–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herrup, Cynthia. 2006. The king's two genders. Journal of British Studies 45 (3): 493–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschmann, Nancy J. 2003. The liberty of the subject: Toward a feminist theory of freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hirschmann, Nancy J. 2008. Gender, class, and freedom in modern political theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hirschmann, Nancy J., and Wright, Joanne. 2012. Hobbes, history, politics, and gender: A conversation with Carole Pateman and Quentin Skinner. In Feminist interpretations of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Wright, Joanne. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1999. De corpore. In The elements of law and politic, ed. Gaskin, J. C. A.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 2002. Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jacquette, Jane. 1998. Contract and coercion: Power and gender in Leviathan. In Women writers in the early modern British tradition, ed. Smith, Hilda. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jordan, Jennifer. 2011. “That ere with Age, his strength is utterly decay'd”: Understanding the male body in early modern manhood. In Bodies, sex and desire from the Renaissance to the present, ed. Fisher, Kate and Toulalan, Sarah. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The king's two bodies: A study in medieval political theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Korhonen, Anu. 2010. “Strange things out of hair”: Baldness and masculinity in early modern England. Sixteenth Century Journal 41 (2): 371–91.Google Scholar
Kristiansson, Magnus, and Tralau, Johan. 2014. Hobbes's hidden monster: A new interpretation of the frontispiece of Leviathan. European Journal of Political Theory 13 (3): 299–320.
Laqueur, Thomas. 1992. Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Levy, Aaron. 1954. Economic views of Thomas Hobbes. Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (4): 589–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lloyd, S. A. 2012. Power and sexual subordination in Hobbes's political theory. In Feminist interpretations of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Hirschmann, Nancy J and Wright, Joanne. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Lott, Tommy L. 2002. Patriarchy and slavery in Hobbes's political philosophy. In Philosophers on race: Critical essays, ed. Ward, Julie K. and Lott, Tommy L.. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The political theory of possessive individualism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Malcolm, Noel. 2002. Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKeown, Maeve. 2019. The naturall condition of mankind. European Journal of Political Theory 18 (2): 281–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelson, Susan, and Patricia, Crawford. 1998. Women in early modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Moloney, Pat. 2011. Hobbes, savagery, and international anarchy. American Political Science Review 105 (1): 189–205.10.1017/S0003055410000511CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ng, Su Fang. 2012. Hobbes and the bestial body of sovereignty. In Feminist interpretations of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Wright, Joanne. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Odzuck, Eva. 2019. “Not a woman-hater,” “no rapist,” or even inventor of “the sensitive male”? Feminist interpretations of Hobbes's political theory and their relevance for Hobbes studies. In Interpreting Hobbes's political philosophy, ed. Lloyd, S. A.. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Okin, Susan Moller. 1979. Women in western political thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
O'Neill, Daniel I., Shanley, Mary Lyndon, and Young, Iris Marion, eds. 2008. Illusion of consent: Engaging with Carole Pateman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Panagia, Davide. 2003. Delicate discriminations: Thomas Hobbes's science of politics. Polity 36 (1): 91–114.10.1086/POLv36n1ms3235425CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pateman, Carole. 1988. The sexual contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Pye, Christopher. 1984. The sovereign, the theater, and the kingdome of darknesse: Hobbes and the spectacle of power. Representations 8 (October): 84–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reinhardt, Mark. 2015. Vision's unseen: On sovereignty, race, and the optical unconscious. Theory and Event 18 (4): 1–36.Google Scholar
Richardson, Janice. 2016. Hobbes’ frontispiece: Authorship, subordination and contract. Law and Critique 27: 63–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skinner, Quentin. 2008. Hobbes and republican liberty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Springborg, Patricia. 2015. Hobbes, Donne, and the Virginia Company: Terra nullius and “the bulimia of dominium.” History of Political Thought 36 (1): 113–64.Google Scholar
Sreedhar, Susanne. 2012a. Hobbes on “the woman question.” Philosophy Compass 7 (11): 772–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sreedhar, Susanne. 2012b. Toward a Hobbesian theory of sexuality. In Feminist interpretations of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Wright, Joanne. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Keith. 1965. The social origins of Hobbes's political thought. In Hobbes Studies, ed. Brown, K.C.. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wright, Joanne. 2004. Origin stories in political thought: Discourses on gender, power, and citizenship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.10.3138/9781442678149CrossRefGoogle Scholar