“Pretenders of a Vile and Unmanly Disposition”: Thomas Hobbes on the Fiction of Constituent Power

• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Date: 01 August 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718805979
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718805979

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(4) 475 –499

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718805979

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Article

“Pretenders of a Vile and

Unmanly Disposition”:

Thomas Hobbes on the

Fiction of Constituent

Power

Adam Lindsay1

Abstract

The prevailing interpretation of constituent power is taken to be the

extra-institutional capacity of a group, typically “the people,” to establish

or revise the basic constitutional conditions of a state. Among many

contemporary democratic theorists, this is understood as a collective

capacity for innovation. This paper excavates an alternative perspective

from constituent power’s genealogy. I argue that constituent power is not

a creative material power, but is a type of political claim that shapes the

collective rights, responsibilities, and identity of “the people.” I do so by

recovering Thomas Hobbes’s intervention into debates over constituent

power among Scottish Presbyterians during the English Civil War. Though a

materialist, Hobbes appreciated the centrality of the imagination to politics,

and he argued that constituent power was one such phantasm of the mind.

In Leviathan, he showed constituent power not to be a material power, but

a world-making fiction that furnished political realities with ornamentation

of the imagination, which might provide the beliefs and justifications to serve

any number of political ends. More generally, the retrieval of a Hobbesian

constituent power provides an important challenge to contemporary

1School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United

Kingdom

Corresponding Author:

Adam Lindsay, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Law

and Social Sciences Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG15 8HE, United Kingdom.

Email: adam.lindsay3@nottingham.ac.uk

805979PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718805979Political TheoryLindsay

research-article2018

476 Political Theory 47(4)

theories by demonstrating how partisan constructions of constituent power

shape the political options available to groups.

Keywords

Thomas Hobbes, constituent power, imagination, the people, representation,

democratic theory

In chapter 18 of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes described a group of seditious

Presbyterians as “pretenders . . . of a vile and unmanly disposition.”1 The

source of Hobbes’s outrage was the contract that they purported to have con-

structed in service to their disobedience to the King. These arguments were a

variation on early modern theories of constituent power, which Hobbes

sought to reveal as a dangerous and underhand fiction that exploited the

imagination of fellow believers. The recovery of Hobbes’s neglected con-

demnation of these Presbyterians, the Scottish Covenanters, has much to

offer contemporary theories of constituent power. Constituent power com-

monly refers to the extra-institutional capacity of a group to establish or

revise the basic constitutional conditions of a state. Among many contempo-

rary democratic theorists, this is understood as a materialist potentia or a

voluntarist capacity to enact change. Andreas Kalyvas, following Carl

Schmitt, associates constituent power with the establishment of government

through “human will,” analogous to “physical natality.”2 Mark Wenman

arrives at the same conclusion by following Antonio Negri. He defines it as a

“capacity for innovation,” which he sharply distinguishes from “power qua

right (potestas).”3 As a dynamic capacity for innovation that might manifest

either in the potential of a decentralised multitude, or a mode of insurgent

citizenship, constituent power has become a pivotal instrument within the

toolkit of political and legal theorists engaged in constitutionalism.4 Though

these reflections have provided valuable reconsiderations of what might

count as valid democratic activity, they also fix constituent power within

relatively unchanging parameters, namely, as the vehicle for political contes-

tation borne by the ostensible “creators” of the state.

The purpose of this article is to retrieve another way of thinking about

constituent power. I argue that it is not a capacity for self-legitimising collec-

tive innovation, but serves as one tool among the many fictional components

of our political language that contribute to the rich, layered thought-practices

that comprise and pattern political thinking. “Constituent power” is a mal-

leable element of our political vocabulary that, when incorporated into argu-

ments, supplements and shapes partisan claims over the meaning and content

of collective representative tropes, such as “the people.”