Hobbes and hats
By Teresa M. Bejan, College of Oxford
There isn’t a extra analyzed picture within the historical past of political thought than Hobbes’ frontispiece Leviathan (1651), but the small figures that make up the large have largely escaped scholarly consideration. So do their hats. This text recreates what males’s failure to “take on and off” their hats within the frontispiece might need conveyed to readers about their relationship to the sovereign and one another. Typically massive concepts—in regards to the nature of illustration, or learn how to “acknowledge” equality—are conveyed by small gestures. When positioned textually and contextually, Hobbes’s hats shed necessary gentle on the micropolitics of on a regular basis interplay for many who, like Hobbes himself, hope to securely represent an egalitarian society.