ABSTRACT
Ioannis D. Evrigenis When omas Hobbes advanced his elaborate and, in many ways, novel theory of absolute sovereignty, he claimed that it was equally applicable to monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, ‘for either One, or More, or All, must have the Soveraign Power (which I have shewn to be indivisible) entire’.1 Hobbes’s own preference for monarchy, coupled with the imagery of Leviathan, convinced many of his readers that his theory was the groundwork for an absolute monarchy of the kind that ruled France. us, in 1651, the republican William Rand noted,
For that Empire the Whale holds in the Sea is a t resemblance of the Monarchy [Hobbes] would establish, submitting all to the will of a man who many times measures right by this power, & by potency of Lusts, has little more reason then a Whale, & under whose government the Law of Liviathan is established vz: at it be right & t that the great shes eat up the little, as it is in France at this day & elsewhere.2
