Hobbes e l’immaginazione politica

The article argues for the relevance of imagination in Hobbes’s construction of the State as a political artefact. The anthropological theory of imagination exposed by Hobbes in the Elements and in the Leviathan shows how deeply fictions can shape human passions and experiences. On this basis, the article contends that representation, seen as a specific function of human fiction, can be considered as the symbolical force that holds human beings together under political authorities. Thus, the broadest goal of Hobbesian politics, especially in the Leviathan, consists in the clearing away of the false representative imaginations of human beings, in order to create ex nihilo the only kind of fiction – the person of the commonwealth – that allows each member of the multitude to consider him/herself as the real author of all the sovereign’s acts.