Abstract

This article reconstructs the use that Hobbes makes of the concept of the «person» in Leviathan, through an examination of the characteristics of the three subjects of his civil philosophy: the Multitude, the Commonwealth, and the Sovereign. Building on previous and extensive literature on the subject, I propose a new interpretation of what the Commonwealth is in Hobbes’s civil philosophy, an ideological projection of the Sovereign for use by the Multitude. I also argue that this «production» of something inexistent, i.e. the will of the people, is always unstable and represents the birth of consensual politics in modern political theory.