Hobbes's Leviathan and the Absolute Sovereign

Having established the miseries of the state of nature, Hobbes devotes Leviathan's chapters 17 and 18 to the mechanism by which peace is achieved: a covenant in which every individual mutually transfers his natural right of self-government to a single person or assembly, on the condition that all others do the same. Unlike an ordinary contract between two parties, this is a covenant of "every man with every man," and it generates something new — "a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person," which Hobbes names the Commonwealth, or civitas, and, more famously, the Leviathan, borrowing the name of the biblical sea-monster of Job 41. The 1651 edition's celebrated engraved frontispiece, generally attributed to the French artist Abraham Bosse working from Hobbes's own design, depicts a crowned giant whose body is composed of hundreds of individual subjects, towering over a peaceful landscape, sword and crozier in hand — a visual emblem of Hobbes's claim that the sovereign's "artificial" person is literally constituted out of the wills of the multitude.