Tracing Hobbesian Sovereignty in Political Representation

Abstract

This thesis examines how contemporary political thought has deployed the concept of political representation. I argue that the leading contemporary accounts of Hanna Pitkin, Michael Saward and Nadia Urbinati overlook the constitutive relationship between political representation and political sovereignty. This relationship is rooted in their founding inheritance from Thomas Hobbes’ accounts of political representation and political sovereignty. The silence of these accounts about their Hobbesian inheritance means that the contemporary grasp of the concept of political representation is more tenuous than admitted. Without dealing with the question of Hobbesian sovereignty, contemporary political thought on political representation comes to be a silent carrier of its elements and vulnerable to exploitation by its defenders and proponents. The resolution of this inheritance and its accompanying tensions has significant consequences for how politics is to be conceived and understood today.