Abstract

We shall attempt to elucidate the concept of ‘civil person’, as developed by Hobbes in both On the Citizen and Leviathan. This is where the idea of political subjectification takes its first steps in modern political theory. Such a process of political subjectification is meant by Hobbes as a process of construction of the ‘artificial person’ of the State. The fact that Hobbes defines the persona ficta of the State as ‘artificial’ sometimes leads scholars to forget that he sees the State as a ‘person’ and that the novelty of his theory is as much to be found in the formula auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem as in his investigation into the type of personality or subjectivity that the modern State embodies. Hobbes’s essays are worth revisiting today, when the question of political subjectification seems to have become challenging again. In the final section of this paper we shall consider a recent reading of Hobbes’s theory proposed by Giorgio Agamben. With the aim of calling into question the very idea and possibility of political subjectification, Agamben critically addresses Hobbes’s notion of ‘civil person’. We will argue that, instead of promoting a rejection of modern political theory in the name of messianic politics, as Agamben does, it is more advisable to look into the differences between monarchy and aristocracy, on the one side, and democracy, on the other, as Hobbes did.