Democracy and the political body in Hobbes: a reading of the Elements of Law

Abstract

In the Elements of Law, Hobbes evidences the passage from the multitude to the people by which the reduction of the multiple to the one is evidenced. The evidence of the unity of wills indicates that democracy is the first foundation in the order of constitution of political institutions by which it makes possible the consensual apparatus and, therefore, the Hobbesian conception of a political body. The objective of this article is to understand the terms of democracy in Hobbes, specifically in the context of his work Elements of Law and its relation to the establishment of the political body. It is, therefore, to highlight the way in which the idea of the people operates the conversion of particular wills originally in disagreement into a single will. Insofar as the union of individual wills toward the submission of the single will becomes the condition for the establishment of democracy. In these terms, it is demonstrated that the condition of unity present in the political body becomes compatible with the conciliation of wills towards a single end that identifies itself with the terms of the public will.