LAUSR

ABSTRACT In recent years, the role of fiction in Hobbes’s system of philosophy has come under growing pressure. This is most clearly reflected in various attempts to dismiss the characterization of Hobbes’s state as a person by fiction or even as a person at all. This paper argues against this trend by demonstrating that Hobbes employs fiction in a more consistent and more fundamental way than has been previously recognized. In particular, the paper argues that Hobbes uses fiction to refer to both a peculiar set of mental operations and the ‘things’ they originate, and that he attributes fiction, as process and as product of that process, key cognitive and world-making functions. Chief amongst the latter, the article argues, is the enactment of the people as a representational fiction. This requires the creation of an intersubjectively shared imaginary encouraging individuals to think themselves and act from their position as citizens, identifying with a collective whose unified will the state – and it only – expresses and enacts.