• DOI:10.1353/elh.0.0011
• Corpus ID: 162034742

Re-membering the Body Politic: Hobbes and the Construction of Civic Immortality

@article{Atti2008RememberingTB,
  title={Re-membering the Body Politic: Hobbes and the Construction of Civic Immortality},
  author={Katherine Bootle Atti{\'e}},
  journal={ELH},
  year={2008},
  volume={75},
  pages={497 - 530}
}

• K. B. Attié
• Published 30 August 2008
• History
• ELH

If the body politic, whereby the nature and composition of the civil state is described analogically in terms of the human body, was not a dead metaphor by the early seventeenth century, it was at best in critical condition. It suffered from chronic overexposure before glazed English eyes, and Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606), essentially an elaboration on Jacobean absolutist rhetoric, came close to delivering the coup de grâce. Forset frets that “raunging too far, I be offensivelie tedious, or seeking to match all, I mar all by making more adoo than I need.”1 Anyone who wades through this account of the seemingly endless correspondences between natural and political parts, forms, functions, fluxes, and diseases is obliged to acknowledge that the author’s fears were not entirely unfounded. At the same time, it was precisely the trope’s familiarity and conventionality that made it suitable to James I as a vehicle for his bold new defense of the royal prerogative. James was fond of pointing out that “the proper office of a king towards his Subjects, agrees very wel with the office of the head towards the body”: “the head hath the power of directing all the members of the body to that use which the judgement in the head thinkes most convenient.”2 He uses the analogy to make popular rebellion against a divinely ordained king seem not only unlawful but “monstrous and unnatural.”3 While it is entirely within the natural order of things that the king crush any insurrection to protect and preserve the whole realm, the reverse is almost unconscionable: “And for the similitude of the head and the body, it may very well fall out that the head will be forced to . . . cut off some rotten members . . . to keep the rest of the body in integritie: but what state the body can be in, if the head, for any infirmitie that can fall to it, be cut off, I leave it to the readers judgement.”4 Historical hindsight, of course, enables the reader to judge James’s invocation of the anarchic, headless multitude to be an ironic prophesy of the fate of his son Charles I. For all the exhaustive emphasis on the anatomical similarities between man and the state, the traditional image of the