The multitude in the mirror: Hobbes on power, rhetoric and materialism

Abstract

This article analyses the Hobbesian link between materialism and rhetoric through the metaphor of the multitude. The central claim is that it is not possible to understand Hobbes' intended political practice, which stems from his theory of language, if we do not take the relation Hobbes describes between materialism and the eloquence of words to its logical conclusion. Incorporating materialism into a rhetorical analysis, we realize the parasitical character of the Hobbesian notion of person related to the sovereign, as well as the fiction of the sovereign that constitutes the entire cause of order by itself.