Hobbes’s account of the commonwealth is standardly interpreted to be primarily a theory of contract, whereby the archetypal manner of forming a political community is via an act of mutual agreement between suspicious individuals of equal power. By examining Hobbes’s theories of the pre-political family, and what he says about the role of real history in the development of political societies, I conclude that this standard interpretation is untenable. Rather, Hobbes’s conception of commonwealth ‘by institution’ is a hypothetical model used to illustrate the mechanics of sovereignty, and to reconcile men to the conditions of subjection to absolute political power. In practice, all sovereignty is originally by ‘acquisition’. Realizing this casts serious doubt on the possibility that Hobbes is a fundamentally democratic thinker. In turn, we are invited to reconsider the history of political thought after Hobbes, in particular by seeing his theory of the family and of history as a genealogical ancestor of Scottish Enlightenment political theory.This work was supported by The Arts and Humanities Research Council block grant, and the University of Cambridge Faculty of History Prince Consort & Thirlwall Trust.This is the accepted manuscript version. The final version is available from http://ept.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/21/1474885114531237.abstract
