Hobbes and the Wolf-Man

Hobbes and the Wolf-Man: Melancholy and Animality in ModernSovereignty

Diego Rossello

New Literary History, Volume 43, Number 2, Spring 2012, pp. 255-279(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/nlh.2012.0011

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New Literary History, 2012, 43: 255–279

Hobbes and the Wolf-Man: Melancholy and Animality in Modern Sovereignty

Diego Rossello

They err who write no wolves in England range. Here men are all turned wolves, O monstrous change.

—James Howell, “Letter LVIII, December 1, 1644”

H omo homini lupus, or “man is a wolf to man,” remains one of the most well-known dicta in the tradition of political theory.1 Scholars take this sentence—originally from Plautus and re-

phrased by Thomas Hobbes in the Epistle Dedicatory of De Cive—to illustrate the brutish, anarchical condition of man in the natural state. This assimilation of Hobbes’s dictum to the war of all against all may be apt, but it can also conceal the obvious. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suggest that “man is a wolf to man” directs our attention to two key questions in seventeenth-century English politics and culture: melancholy and the human-animal distinction. By asserting yet also questioning this distinction, Hobbes’s work offers a valuable resource for a nonhumanist vision of the foundations of political authority.

Hobbes’s political theory has been interpreted within a humanist consensus that neglects a bizarre, and yet theoretically substantial, ar-ticulation of melancholy and animality in Hobbes’s time: lycanthropy. Lycanthropy was a peculiar kind of melancholic syndrome that Hobbes’s contemporaries (but also psychiatrists today) described as the delusional experience of turning into an animal—often, but not exclusively, into a wolf. Hobbes’s contemporaries were prone to conceptualize the politi-cal and religious turmoil leading to the English Civil War through the lens of lycanthropy.2 For example, James Howell, the historian, writer, and pamphleteer, reacted to the events of the English Civil War along these lines, resenting “the calamities of the time, and the desperate case of this nation, who seem to have fallen quite from the very faculty of reason, and to be possessed with a pure lycanthropy, with a wolfish kind of disposition to tear one another in this manner. . . . They err who write no wolves in England range / Here men are all turned wolves, O

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monstrous change.”3 In his book The Anatomy of Melancholy (originally published in 1621 and republished eight times during Hobbes’s life) Robert Burton asserts that the melancholic “howls like a wolf” and “barks like a dog” and suggests that even “kingdoms and provinces are melancholy.”4 The political valence of The Anatomy is stressed by scholars who suggest that “Burton’s descriptions of state melancholy anticipate Hobbes’s by employing humoral terminology to describe a country as one might a human body.”5 If, as Howell argues, “men are all turned wolves,” a political theorist like Hobbes, attuned to the problems of the time, would have to address the issue of how to help men regain their composure, and turn them back into humans.

Whether Hobbes as an individual was affected by melancholy is not a question this paper will try to address.6 Instead, my aim is to show that Hobbes’s political theory can be read productively as a kind of therapy for melancholic lycanthropy. In Leviathan, Hobbes moves from an analysis of the “causeless fears” of the melancholic to an account of the folly of the multitude who will “fight against, and destroy those, by whom all their life-time before, they have been protected, and secured from injury” (L 55). The abandonment of reason fueled by “superstitious behavior” and “the opinion of being inspired” predisposes men to rebellion and inclines them to take part in the “Seditious roaring of a troubled Nation” (54, 55). “Passions unguided” (55), folly and melancholy, mental instability and spiritual malaise, are concerns for Hobbes. Thus, whereas Howell and Burton stage the political and religious turmoil of the Jacobean (and post-Jacobean) era in terms of lycanthropy, Hobbes acknowledges these wolfish humors and seeks a political solution.7 To paraphrase a book on melancholy contemporary to Burton’s: Hobbes brings sovereign comforts to troubled consciousnesses.8

But positing the relevance of lycanthropy for political theory is not an easy task. Although in the late Renaissance and early modernity the lycanthrope had already captured the attention of Jean Bodin, James I, Thomas Adams, and Burton, among others, by the twenty-first century a robust combination of mythology, folk tales, pop culture, and gothic literary and cinematic imagination has confined the lycanthrope to the realm of the fantastic—accompanied by vampires, unicorns, centaurs, and other extraordinary creatures. During Hobbes’s formative years, however, lycanthropy was shifting from a predominantly theological figure, a kind of demonic possession, to a physiological one, the product of an acute melancholic syndrome.9 Political theory was undergoing a similar transformation in this period, shifting from the divinely ordained foundations of political authority to a scientific and physiological un-derstanding of the commonwealth as a body politic.10 What are we to

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make of the family resemblances in these shifts from the theological to the physiological?

Walter Benjamin is useful here, for in his own theory of modernity he conceptualizes, through melancholy, not only this shift from the theological to the physiological, but also shape-shifting as such. Ac-cording to Benjamin, those who exceed in melancholy may become beasts.11 The prince of the baroque mourning play, Benjamin argues, becomes melancholy because he ceases to represent the authority of God on earth, and all forms of life mourn with him. This melancholy is religious, the product of God’s withdrawal from human history, but also physiological: literally, it afflicts the sufferer with an abundance of black bile characteristic of the rabid dog.12 Benjamin is interested in the melancholic condition of the mourning play’s prince and his subjects, but also in the plurality of symbols and embodiments of Renaissance and early modern melancholy such as dogs, mad dogs, and Saturn, among others.13 I take his inventory of saturnine beings as a guide to the symp-toms of melancholy in Hobbes’s political theory. Benjamin’s insights are well partnered with Derrida’s: both deploy a subtle materialism that not only welcomes improbable melancholic beings to the realm of enquiry, but also casts a critical eye on the logocentric distinction between the human and the nonhuman.14 Together, their approaches help us grasp the significance of the lycanthrope for political theory.

This article will proceed as follows. In section one I attend to Hobbes’s own animalization of the human being as seen by his contemporaries. I suggest that Hobbes attends to the lycanthropic tendencies of his time when he presents the state of nature as one in which man is a wolf to man. In section two I show that Hobbes’s political theory acts therapeu-tically: it responds to the problem of human wolfishness by building a frontier between animal and human, casting the former as nonpolitical and the latter as political. I also highlight the ambiguities brought about by this project of political humanization. In section three I take issue with what I call the humanist consensus, namely, a way of approaching Hobbes’s political theory that does not attend critically to his project for the rehumanization of politics and is not alert to the pathologies it generates. In section four I trace several symptoms of lycanthropy in Hobbes’s political theory such as wolfish voracity, dogs, mad dogs, and melancholic men, among others. Through an analysis of these symptoms, I shed light on sovereignty as the constant, albeit futile, pursuit of wolf and man. Section five concludes with a glimpse of new possibilities for political theory suggested by Hobbes’s wolf-man.


I. Animalizing the Human: Hobbes the Provocateur

Hobbes’s contemporaries were outraged at his depiction of human life in the state of nature. Commentators like Helen Thornton and Pat Moloney convincingly show that Hobbes’s contemporaries perceived him as radically departing from the scriptural account of Creation to posit creatures abandoned by God to a brutish and animalistic existence.15 However, these scholars remain inattentive to the common thread that connects the various condemnations of Hobbes. Notwithstanding their many differences, Aristotelian scholastics, Cambridge Platonists, royalist statesmen, clergymen, and political theorists, among others, all shared a definite animosity towards Hobbes’s animalization of the human being.

The Anglican clergyman Samuel Parker thought that if we were to give credit to Hobbes’s account of the natural condition, then “out of Diffidence and Jealousie one of another for want of acquaintance shun’d Society, and withdrew like all other Beasts of Prey into Dens and secret Retirements, where they lived poor and solitary as Bats and Owls, and subsisted like Vermine by robbing and filching from one another.”16 Robert Filmer similarly argued that it should not be thought that “God would create man in a condition worse than beasts” and worried that such condition would make men “worse than cannibals.”17 The Archbishop John Bramhall asserted that “the Hobbian nature of man, is worse than the nature of Bears, or Wolves, or the most savage wild beasts,”18 and added that “If God would have had men live like wild beasts, as lions, bears or tigers, he would have armed them with horns, or tusks, or talons, or pricks.”19 Another clergyman, William Lucy, wrote that Hobbes’s state of nature makes “[m]en to be beasts, or if they have more wit than beasts, to be by that only enabled to be more barbarous and beastly than Beasts themselves.”20 Edward Hyde, politician, historian, and Earl of Clarendon, held that God created man in his image and gave him dominion over all things created, and therefore “to uncreate him to such a baseness and villany in his nature . . . , as to make man . . . more a Beast in his frame and constitution than those he is appointed to govern, is a power that God never gave to the Devil; nor hath anybody assumed it, till Mr. Hobbes took it upon him.”21 The Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth argued similarly: “[H]e that does not perceive any higher degree of perfection in a man than in an oyster . . . hath not the reason or understanding of a man in him.”22 John Vesey, the biographer of Bramhall, deployed less of a concern with theological questions and qualified Hobbes simply as a “pandor to bestiality.”23

Hobbes’s animalization of the human being upset many. But why was this animalization necessary, if at all? It may be that in a context of


acute religious and political strife Hobbes decided to give up a meta-physical understanding of human dignitas to recast human politicality in more animalistic, realist terms. Although Christian humanists were willing to question the beastly ways of their fellow human beings from a moralistic perspective, they failed to see that Hobbes was pressing the unstable nature of human nature beyond the collapse of divine favor conceived in postlapsarian terms. Instead, his political theory relaxed the human-animal divide in terms that perhaps anticipate, and prepare the ground for, Charles Darwin’s own animalization of the human being. Thus, after Hobbes’s intervention, scholastic arguments that grounded human dignity on the possession of a soul, reason, and free will became increasingly unsound, even more so when confronted with the spectacle of regicide and civil war.

When Hobbes characterized life outside of political community as “brutish” (L 89) and as “savagery” (DC 40), and included scenes of wild men predating on each other in the frontispiece of De Cive, many of his contemporaries got the message, and they abhorred it. But Hobbes’s animalization of the human being came with crucial qualifications. His political theory tempered or tamed his apparent demotion of the hu-man to the animal by, at the very same time, redrawing the lines that distinguish between the two, and calling attention to the contrast between the nonpolitical gregariousness of nonhuman animals and the political character specific to human associations.

II. De-Animalizing the Political: Leaving the Wolf Behind?

Even while he animalizes the human, Hobbes also distances the human from the animal by distinguishing sociability in the animal kingdom from a human polity. Unlike the more encompassing zoological understand-ing of the notion of the political animal presented by Aristotle in the The History of Animals, Hobbes thinks that the “gathering together” of certain animals is “not to be termed political” (DC 168).24 Also against Aristotle in The Politics, he asserts that humans are not driven towards a political community by nature but only by artifice (169).25 According to Hobbes, human animals depend on the artifice of the commonwealth to be what they are; if they fall outside of it, they do not just exit a political order, they also default on their humanity—and return to the brutish existence proper to the “liberty of the beasts.”26 Norberto Bob-bio grasped this idea in Hobbes when he asserted that “the wolf-man is inhuman because it is less than human.”27


In The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan, Hobbes presents us with an argument about the human animal that is comprised of three overall claims: 1) humans are animals; 2) animals are not political; and 3) human animals can be political by the use of words, which is to say that being human is a process: the precarious and unstable result of humanization by way of speech and ratiocination. 1) The claim that humans are animals is Hobbes’s challenge to human exceptionalism: it deprives human-animals of any exceptional faculty (spirit, reason, and free will) that would distinguish them from nonhuman animals. It is only by “Speech, and Method,” namely, by the use of words and by regulating mental discourse, that human animals can distinguish themselves “from all other living Creatures” (L 23). 2) Contra Aristotle’s argument in The History of Animals, but mostly against its abuses by seventeenth-century writers fascinated by the seemingly political organization of bees, Hobbes claims that animal gregariousness is distinct from human politicality.28 He holds that ants and bees, as well as other animals, should not be termed political, because “their government is only a consent, or many wills concurring in one object not (as is necessary in civil government) one will” (DC 168; L 119).29 Moreover, since contracts cannot be made with beasts, nonhuman animals cannot access Hobbes’s only path towards a political existence (DC 128; L 97). 3) Thus human animals can be politi-cal through the use of language because they use words to ratiocinate, personate, and incorporate.30

Hobbes assumes that, without speech and method, humans cannot enter into contracts and are therefore left at the mercy of their natural gregariousness—living a brutish and predatory existence. Native Ameri-cans are Hobbes’s recurrent example of a natural condition whose savagery led Carl Schmitt, three centuries later, to refer to “a domain of werewolves” (L 232, 459).31 Replacing wolfish voraciousness with the right use of words, however, is part of Hobbes’s therapeutic intervention: we cannot devour while speaking, or so he hopes. This is why Hobbes proceeds by, literally, putting words in our mouths in the form of an utterance in which everyone would say: “I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner” (L 120). However replacing wolfish vorac-ity with humanizing practices of speech and method may be difficult. As we shall see, voracious humans and talking wolves are among the unexpected products of Hobbes’s hopeful opposition between voicing and voraciousness.

Most of Hobbes’s readers today, however, neglect his complex poli-tics of humanization and so they miss what I take to be evidence of its


creaturely side effects. This is because they assume that the human is a ground, secure in its distinction from the animal. Here we may do better to take our bearings from Hobbes’s contemporaries who saw in his work an animalization of the human that was, to them, provocative. Why is it no longer provocative to us?

III. The Humanist Consensus and Beyond

Although the authors I discuss below have made major contributions to the reception of Hobbes’s political theory in the last few decades, their arguments all rely on the human-animal distinction as if it were natural and stable, rather than a contested philosophical and historical achievement. Notwithstanding their diverse approaches to Hobbes, Mi-chael Oakeshott, Philip Pettit, and Quentin Skinner share this humanist consensus. Moreover, as we shall see, even those like Anat Biletzki who try to attend to the liminality of the human-animal distinction in Hobbes are often pulled back into humanist premises.

For Oakeshott, “moral conduct concerns the relations of human be-ings to one another and the power they are capable of exerting over one another. This, no doubt, spills over into other relationships—those with animals, for example . . . —but the moral significance of these [relation-ships] lies solely in their reflection of the dispositions of men towards one another.”32 This argument about morality sounds familiar: man is at the center of a morality that may include animals as its objects.33 But the familiarity is itself a product of a contestable assumption that may desen-sitize Hobbes scholars to the instability of the human-animal distinction in his work. Oakeshott assumes this distinction when he takes Hobbes literally and asserts that: “An animal, for example, may feel pleasure and pain, but its vital movements are affected only by an environment . . . its hunger is the hunger of the moment. But human beings have other endowments which amplify the range of their appetites and aversions.”34

Although not incorrect, this reconstruction of Hobbes’s argument is incomplete. Hobbes often transgresses the distinction between animal and human hunger when he resorts to the trope of wolfish voracity to refer to human political affairs, such as the tension between peoples and monarchs (DC 89; B 158); politics among nations (DC 89); the rela-tions between Christians and nonbelievers (L 346) as well as humanity’s disposition towards the future (OM 40). Hobbes also describes the hu-man mind in metaphorical terms as a ranging spaniel (EL 11; L 22).35 If, as Oakeshott argues, human complexity gives rise to appetites whose range is foreign to animals, why is it that Hobbes relies on figurations of


voracious wolves and hunting dogs to shed light on just this amplitude?More recently, Philip Pettit’s impressive book on Hobbes also discusses

the human-animal divide. Pettit argues that Hobbes distinguishes a “natural, animal mind” that is “particularistic and passive” from an active human mind that is able to ratiocinate thanks to the use of language (25). According to Pettit, Hobbes holds that “language or speech is a historical invention,” and that it makes possible the “active form of thinking that we human beings display” (25). Pettit suggests that Hobbes sticks to a “naturalistic explanation” of the origin of language in which humans are able to “jump the limitation of the natural, animal mind.” This enables ratiocination, and gives room to desires “of a reach and kind unknown in other species” (26, 25, 13).

In conjunction with this argument about the origin and significance of language in Hobbes, Pettit makes an unprecedented and problematic move. He adds an intermediate stage between the natural condition of man and the commonwealth. Pettit argues that, for Hobbes, there are three possible modes of human existence: “The state of first nature, when humans are as other animals; the state of second nature, when they leave community with beasts as a result of developing language; and the civil state, in which they incorporate under a sovereign” (99). Pettit’s reorganization of Hobbes’s natural condition into two distinctive moments is clearly intended to make sense of ambiguities in Hobbes’s argument that might trouble the strict distinction between human and animal on which Pettit relies. But positing an analytical distinction between a worded and a nonworded state of nature creates problems of its own. For example: why should we assume that the acquisition of language implies that human-animals leave their community with beasts? Is it merely the fact of language as such that extracts the human from the animal?

Pettit finds support in Hobbes’s claim that “man leaveth all community with beasts at the faculty of imposing names” (EL 35). But in The Elements we find that the invention of names is a product of curiosity (35), which Hobbes conceives of as an “appetite,” specifically a care for knowing the causes shared by humans and beasts.36 Whereas animal curiosity is limited by basic passions (hunger, thirst, lust) which tend to “take away the care of knowing causes” (L 42), human curiosity is distinctive due to the “perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable genera-tion of Knowledge” (21, 42). This is one of the reasons Oakeshott will stress endurance as the specifically human trait, though recall Hobbes conveys it to us by referring to animals who obviously possess something like it as well, even as he may try to suggest otherwise.

Although both humans and animals are curious, this appetite in humans becomes a “lust of the mind” (42), an insatiable hunger or


“appetite for knowledge” (35). It is important to note how Pettit’s ana-lytical distinction between a worded and a nonworded state of nature obscures this possibility: that, for Hobbes, humans never cease to be voraciously curious animals themselves even (or precisely) when they acquire language, and that therefore they never fully exit their “com-munity” with beasts.

Biletzki’s reconstruction of Hobbes’s theory of language seems more hospitable to human animality. However, like Pettit, when faced with the liminality of the human in Hobbes she returns to humanist premises. When Hobbes argues in De Homine that “some brute animals, taught by practice, grasp what we wish and command in words” but “they do so not through words as words, but as signs” (OM 37), Biletzki is moved to ask whether, according to Hobbes, animals are as communicative as humans; and whether they also use signs and signify.37 Because this pas-sage grants animals entry to the signifying function of language Biletzki’s answer is yes, but she senses a problem, a certain human and animal indistinction ensues, and so she moves immediately to claim that “hu-man language must involve more than communicative signification if the borderline between human and animal is to be kept viable through the auspices of language” (181, emphasis added). Here, Biletzki shores up humanist premises by asserting that animals “do not have language . . . they have something which is fundamentally different from human language” (181). But what is this fundamental difference?

Biletzki approaches Hobbes’s conception of language from the per-spective of pragmatics and distinguishes human language from beastly signification: since humans give language a multiplicity of uses, it becomes “a human artifice rather than a natural production” (181). Although animals enjoy forms of sociability and signification, for Biletzki these are not “uses” but merely natural traits conceived as “a-social . . . a-political,” and “a-linguistic” (182). Because language is “humanly created,” Biletzki argues that it “makes room for choice and social structure, moral action and a political sensitivity” (186). However, Biletzki does not show why the multifarious uses humans give to language mean that human lan-guage itself is not a natural production. We need to know more about the distinction between animal/natural language and human/artificial language, because Biletzki claims that if we conceive language pragmati-cally we can “solve the move from the natural . . . to the social-political . . . by recognition of the social inherently subsisting in the natural” (134). Why, however, should we negotiate this move by socializing the natural—humanizing the wolf—instead of by naturalizing the social—animalizing the human? Biletzki argues that reading Hobbes’s theory of language from the perspective of pragmatics allows us to “diminish the distance between Aristotle and Hobbes by saying that man to man


is a talking wolf—and therefore no wolf at all” (135, emphasis added). But, why is a talking wolf no wolf at all?

In sum, Pettit and Biletzski try to resolve the ambiguities in Hobbes’s account by distinguishing linguistic from nonlinguistic creatures. How-ever, by proposing a talking wolf that is no wolf at all, like Biletzki, or by caging the animality of man in a first, nonworded state of nature, like Pettit, both avoid the potentially productive (in)distinction between human and animal in Hobbes’s political theory and miss Hobbes’s own invitation to challenge the humanist project.

A distinct, but also humanist position is favored by Skinner, who re-frames Hobbes’s political philosophy in relation to Renaissance human-ism.38 Skinner’s contextualism departs from historical grand narratives and offers an important corrective to the sedimentation into nearly natural facts of once contestable claims about liberty.39 But since the contextualism of the Cambridge School privileges speech-acts and au-thorial intentionality, some sedimentation persists: human nonanimality is itself assumed and Hobbes’s provocative animalization of the human is left out of the picture entirely, notwithstanding its centrality to his context, if not to ours.

Skinner’s humanist reading of Hobbes is connected to a historians’ debate about periodization: The question of whether Hobbes is a repre-sentative of late Renaissance humanism or an early modern “scientist.”40 This framing of science vs. studia humanitatis leads Skinner to reduce Hobbes’s strong antihumanist moments to a critical dialogue with clas-sical humanist virtues of eloquence and prudence.41 Skinner’s Hobbes is a critic of classical humanist virtue from within, not an advocate of a nonhumanist kind of politics—that unsettles virtue by means of weretue.42

In contrast to the republican historians working within the humanist consensus, Erica Fudge investigates the possibility of a Renaissance non-humanism.43 She focuses on the instability of the human-animal divide in the culture of Hobbes’s formative years–Elizabethan and Jacobean England.44 Fudge argues that in late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-tury England, “the description of many vices—heavy drinking, gluttony, lust . . . —were represented as having the power to transform humans into beasts.”45 Through these descriptions, Fudge identifies a “logic in which humans can actually become animals through their actions.”46 Fudge draws on Burton to show how the failure to control passions such as melancholy (but also joy and fear and bodily reactions such as laughter) was thought capable of unsettling the realm of the human altogether: in Burton’s words, it was important to establish “how a man differs from a dog.”47 Fudge allows us to see that in late Renaissance and early modern England notions such as “dog laughter,”48 “melancholia


canina,”49 and “insania lupina”50 were used to describe what was seen as the unchecked irruption of the animal in the self, producing a grey area of liminality that challenged the supposed naturalness of human superiority not only over other creatures, but also over its own animal-ity. Attending to this liminality, I turn now to suggest, opens up new theoretical possibilities for Hobbes studies.

IV. A Symptomatic Reading of Hobbes

Instead of conceiving of lycanthropy as a mere psychiatric delusion of no interest to political theory, we might read it as a symptom emerg-ing from Hobbes’s politics of animalization and rehumanization. As I have already shown, Hobbes animalizes the human being in the state of nature yet at the same time mobilizes animality (of ants and bees, but also of Native Americans) to then mark the limits of the political. Since the only entry to politics proper is a covenant that requires speech and understanding, animals and the animality of the human being are left out of political order. However, I suggest that the animal returns through symptoms of lycanthropy.

According to Derrida, the animal is both what we are and what we follow, in the double sense of being after the animal: hunting it and chasing it down, but also in the sense of arriving “after” the animal, in the biblical account of creation and in the Darwinian narrative of evo-lution. In the case of Hobbes’s political theory, the animal is precisely what we are and what we follow, in the double sense of being after it: chasing it and hunting it out from the realm of the political, but also in the sense of arriving “after” the animal of the state of nature. As we shall see, the paradox of being both wolf and what comes after a wolf generates an alternative logic and genealogy. A lycology, as Derrida calls it, it is not the logic and genealogy of a sovereign self-transparency that comes full circle through speech and self-consciousness, but a vicious circle where the sovereign self is on the verge of turning into something different from itself: an animal.51

a) Hungry like a Wolf

One specific symptom of lycanthropy in Hobbes’s political theory is the recurring trope of wolfish voracity. When Hobbes praises the possibilities opened to man by speech, he reveals his preference for verbosity over voracity. According to him, speech allows humans to surpass by far “the


condition of other animals” (OM 39). Without speech, Hobbes asserts, “there would be no society among men, no peace, and consequently no disciplines; but first savagery, then solitude, and for dwellings, caves” (OM 40). Language enables man to make covenants and laws and this distances him from an animalistic existence: “[f]or before covenants and laws were drawn up, neither public good nor public evil, was natural among men any more than it was among beasts” (DC 43).

De Cive’s frontispiece illustrates what Richard Ashcraft called the “politics of wild men” in Hobbes.52 Its lower right quadrant depicts a figure of natural liberty barely dressed with leaves, armed with bow and arrow. Skinner notes the figure resembles John White’s watercolors of the life of Native Americans, used to illustrate Thomas Hariot’s report on the original inhabitants of Virginia.53 In the background, a group of savages hunts down one of their own with clubs and arrows. Further in the back, on the right, two human figures squat next to what appears to be a human limb in a trestle, presumably being prepared for eating. In addition, a feline predator is included in the back of the scene, beyond the fences that surround the village, conveying the general idea that, in the natural condition of man, the only law is to eat or be eaten.54

Perhaps in response to the rule of devouring conveyed in the frontis-piece of De Cive, Leviathan’s opening illustration depicts a body politic with recognizable human features that has succeeded in incorporating its subjects wholly, their lives and limbs intact, in a stronger and more encompassing “One Person” or “Artificiall Man” (L 114, 9, emphasis in the original). As Norman Jacobson suggests, however, the gigantic human kingly figure rising above a city, holding a sword and a scepter, can also be read as a shocking image of devouring: “The Sovereign has devoured his subjects, has incorporated them into his own being, while they themselves are transfixed, regarding their devourer.”55 For Jacobson, what looks like a contrast between devouring and voicing is more of a complementarity. If Leviathan has wolfed down his subjects the crucial difference between devouring and using one’s voice is that, whereas in the state of nature individuals are always already about to be hunted down, in the body politic they are always already devoured but intact. But is this really true? Does Leviathan incorporate without disintegrating its subjects? Who (or what) is Leviathan anyway?

Leviathan is represented in the frontispiece with recognizable human traits, but a simple genealogy of this mythical creature suggests a more beastly lineage. Scholars in the humanities and Hobbes’s commentators have shown the multifarious meanings attached to Leviathan across the centuries, from the sea monster of the book of Job and the serpent of Isaiah 27:1 to the seventeenth-century associations with a crocodile or a whale.56 I will not add more figurations to this already protean symbol.


These are enough to indicate that Hobbes’s frontispiece gives human form to a longstanding symbol of animality. Since Leviathan’s devour-ing is a solution to an animalistic and voracious state of nature, Hobbes appears to be caught in a vicious circularity that belies the idea of a human entirely freed of creatureliness (as Skinner, Pettit, and Biletzki would have it).

But Hobbes’s discussion of the voraciousness of Leviathan is important in yet another way: its hunger threatens to undermine the stability and integrity of the human in his political theory. In chapter 29 of Leviathan, Hobbes uses the language of eating and digestive disorders to character-ize some of the challenges to rendering the political community cohe-sive and strong: a body politic. For instance, Hobbes understands the problem of the limits of imperial expansion by signaling “the insatiable appetite, or Bulimia, of enlarging Dominion” (L 230). Furthermore, he not only ascribes “intestine disorder” (221) to the errors of men at instituting a commonwealth but also compares the many corporations in a commonwealth with “lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man” (230). In the same vein, Hobbes compares those who, “animated by False Doctrines,” dare to question absolute power with “little worms,” or intestinal parasites which, Hobbes clarifies somewhat technically, “Physicians call Ascarides” (230). Thus, even if, as I have argued above, Hobbes puts words in our mouths so that we can enter into a political community, as if humans were to say—and constitute themselves as such by saying—“I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing myself . . . ,” the pathologies of being incorporated into a sovereign state are still framed as symptoms of a body politic that devours or is devoured. How can the integrity of the human being—of its life and limbs, but also of its humanity—be guaranteed amidst such encompassing voraciousness?

The trope of voracity appears also in relation to the elongated tem-porality cast as singularly human by Oakeshott, who argued that, for Hobbes, animal hunger is the hunger of the moment. According to Hobbes, humans are distinguished by their desire to know, or at least to be able to foresee, what will happen to them in the times to come; they are not satiated with present well-being. This enables curiosity but also appetite, as we saw earlier. Hobbes argues in De Homine that “man surpasseth in rapacity and cruelty the wolves, bears, and snakes that are not rapacious unless hungry and not cruel unless provoked, whereas man is famished even by future hunger” (OM 40). But why does Hobbes mobilize the trope of wolfish voracity precisely to describe the elongated temporality that Oakeshot ascribes to the human alone? Contrary to Oakeshott, Hobbes seems to indicate that human orientation to the future makes man more beastlike.


b) The Melancholic Person

The specificity of human future-orientedness is also connected to mel-ancholy in Hobbes, a point to which few commentators attend. Hobbes refers to the melancholic no more than three times in his work (EL 40; L 58, 59) and therefore their inattentiveness is understandable. In this case, however, a simple attachment to literal references may be unwarranted. As I argued in the introduction, in early modern Europe melancholy was a mutable notion with numerous figurations, and a subject of wide concern in England.57 Although they focus on a more circumscribed understanding of melancholy (it does not include lycanthropy), the Italian scholars Gianfranco Borrelli and Mauro Simonazzi are pioneers in charting the implications of Hobbes’s discussion of melancholy for his political theory. I will draw on their findings as they shed light on a crucial aspect of my argument about lycanthropy: its recurrence in Hobbes’s therapeutic intervention to curb melancholy.

Borrelli reads melancholy in Hobbes as an obstacle to obedience and political reason. Hobbes’s political theory, he argues, has to curb and restrain “destructive dynamics” like “the fear of violent death, mental suffering, spiritual malaise.”58 The therapeutic dimension of Hobbes’s political theory is therefore exposed, as mental and spiritual instabil-ity can translate into instability in the body politic. An instantiation of this therapeutic concern occurs in Hobbes’s well-known discussion of Prometheus as the prudent man who “looks too far before him in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by feare of death . . . ; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep” (L 76). Although Hobbes mentions “anxiety” as the key affective malaise in the prudent man, Borrelli argues, linking Hobbes and Burton, that there is also a connection here to melancholy.

In The Anatomy Burton also refers to Prometheus: “A melancholy man . . . bound to Caucasus.”59 Borrelli suggests that the prudent man can be thought of as melancholic, and holds that this malaise is due to the failure of the “policy of transcendence” put forward by the ecclesiasti-cal powers which failed to “connect the long-term aims, and above all the security of life and spiritual salvation, with the aims nearest to indi-vidual interests” (92). This religious melancholy can have “antipolitical” implications for Hobbes’s project, Borrelli argues, as the melancholic person resists the establishment of the recta ratio that leads individuals away from the state of nature and into a commonwealth. Borrelli goes as far as to stress the “political value” of “the treatment of madness and of melancholy,” as they can have “lacerating effects for the political unity of the State,” and to suggest that there is “an internal part of each subject which will never be possible to govern entirely” (95–96).


Simonazzi also stresses affinities between Burton and Hobbes. Whereas Burton practices introspection, dissecting his own melancholic tenden-cies, confident that “out of a fellow-feeling” he may help others, Hobbes celebrates introspection as key to the art of government, as the ruler “must read in himself, not this, or that particular man, but Man-kind” (L 11).60 Simonazzi focuses on the peculiar trait of Hobbesian human psychology also pinpointed by Borrelli: the projection towards the fu-ture. In his reading of Hobbes, Simonazzi asserts that “Man, as opposed to animal, has therefore got a dilated timescale, he doesn’t just live in the present and for the immediate, but he knows the dimensions of past and future” (46). Whereas animals are stuck in the moment, in the satisfaction of immediate bodily appetites (hunger or lust), human beings need “the dimension of the future . . . for the satisfaction of the pleasures of the mind” (46). Paradoxically, Simonazzi finds that the melancholy generated by this “dilated timescale” is precisely what distinguishes humans from animals, and concludes that melancholy is “An illness specific and exclusive to man” (40).

Borrelli and Simonazzi are right to recognize the therapeutic dimen-sion of Hobbes’s political theory. I depart from their diagnosis, however, because it obscures the link between melancholy and animality, making melancholy specific to humans. In this way, Simonazzi shores up the humanist consensus: he takes what in my view is a symptom of the hu-man- animal indistinction as a mark of the human as such. It is ironic to find the grounds of the distinction between human and animal in a dilated timescale that, for Hobbes, not only distances humans from animals, but also turns humans into creatures more voracious than wolves (OM 40). In addition, neither Borrelli nor Simonazzi attend to another revealing intertextual link between Hobbes and Burton. Burton describes lycanthropes as persons who “run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded but that they are wolves, or some such beasts,” and he introduces the case of a Dutch man who “haunted about graves, and kept in churchyards.”61 When Hobbes himself describes the melancholic person, he asserts that he or she is character-ized by “haunting of solitudes and graves” (L 54).

In short, Hobbes’s own description of the melancholic reveals a wolf in human’s clothing. Hobbes’s therapy for this melancholic creature comes in the shape of sovereign comforts that, ultimately, reproduce the symptoms of lycanthropy that they aim to alleviate. Although Borelli and Simonazzi focus on the melancholic, they neglect its participation in a vicious circularity of creaturely mournfulness. A discussion of Saturn, the mythical king of the Golden Age, will allow us to link this vicious circularity with the question of sovereignty.


c) Saturn and Mad Dogs

Hobbes turns to the myth of Saturn in the context of a discussion of doctrines that justify “that a tyrant king might lawfully be put to death” (DC 96–97). Hobbes opposes the early modern, antimonarchical take on ancient writers and reminds us that “they [the ancients] reverenced the supreme power. . . . Therefore they little used, as in our days, to join themselves with ambitious and hellish spirits, to the utter ruin of the state” (97). The figure of Saturn is introduced in this context as an example of the way in which the ancients “chose to have the science of justice wrapped up in fables” (97). Hobbes writes: “Wherefore it was peace and a golden age, which ended not before that, Saturn being expelled, it was taught lawful to take up arms against kings” (97).

But Hobbes’s plea for peaceful obedience to the monarchical author-ity according to the example of “the ancients” only tells half of Saturn’s story. The other half is covered by Benjamin: the story of Saturn is also the saturnine story of the demise of sovereignty. Benjamin describes the saturnine prince as “someone who has been bitten by a mad dog: he experiences terrifying dreams and is afraid for no good reason.”62 According to the myth commented on by Benjamin, Cronos-Saturn, the son of Gaia and Uranus, led a rebellion of the Titans against the rule of his father. As a result, Uranus was dethroned and emasculated by Cronos. Afterwards, haunted by a prophecy that foretold his own dethroning at the hands of one of his children, Cronos devoured his progeny as they were born.63 Thus Benjamin’s commentary on the “Cronos-concept” combines the fearful disposition of the melancholic and the voracious-ness of the wolf. 64

However, according to Hobbes, the mad dog does not dwell in the ruler, as in Benjamin, but in those subjects who oppose the monarch in the name of the freedom of the ancients. Hobbes argues that certain thinkers, influenced by Greek and Latin writers, spread out the opinion that “the Subjects in a Popular Common-wealth enjoy Liberty; but that in a Monarchy they are all Slaves” (L 226). This suggests it is lawful to kill a king, though “they say not Regicide, that is, killing of a King, but Tyrannicide, that is, killing of a Tyrant” (226). Hobbes thinks therapeu-tically and compares the pernicious effects of “democraticall writers” (226) with “venim” transmitted by “the biting of a mad Dogge,” whose effects work in man as if it “endeavoured to convert him into a Dogge” (226). Like Howell, who wrote that England during the civil war could be called “the Isle of Dogs,” and like Burton, who was concerned about the necessity of distinguishing man and dog, Hobbes finds in the demo-cratic “mad dogs” a threat (probably also an alternative) to his effort


to humanize the political realm. If men are mad dogs to other men, Hobbes reasons, a widespread wolfish voracity becomes too pressing a possibility. If left untouched by Hobbes’s humanization, anarchy and wolfish voracity would reign undisputed.

Hobbes’s brief foray into the politics of rabies can be linked back to Burton’s discussion of the same disease. Burton examines the symptoms of rabies or hydrophobia right after dealing with lycanthropy. Hydro-phobia, Burton tells us, can also produce lycanthropic effects, since the syndrome includes barking and howling: humans affected by rabies act as if they have been turned into dogs or wolves.65 At this point, the metamorphic spasms of creaturely life taking shape under Hobbes’s ar-gument are somewhat difficult to discern and follow. But through that difficulty, we see Hobbes’s political theory in the fascinating ambiguity of its therapeutic intervention: it stands both as the antidote and the poison; it fights the lycanthropic symptoms and reenacts them; it strives for a political humanization but begins by animalizing the human being.

In a Hobbesian world of fearful melancholics, politics is about phobias and so Hobbes moves from hydrophobia to tyrannophobia: “So when a monarchy is once bitten to the quick, by those Democraticall writers, that continually snarle at that estate; it wanteth nothing more than a strong Monarch, which nevertheless out of a certain Tyrannophobia, or feare of being strongly governed, when they have him, they abhorre” (L 226). In fact, these mad dogs in human clothing, these werewolves, are afraid of being enslaved by a monarchy. According to Hobbes, a subject under a monarchy is not a slave because “he is not hindred to doe what he has a will to do” (L 146): subjects of a monarch are not chained. However, out of the fear of being enslaved, men act as if they were mad dogs, growling and biting at a tyrant that, according to Hobbes, does not actually exist. Hobbes himself brings up the notion of “causeless fears” associated with melancholy (54). If melancholy brings up fears that have no cause, it resists the forms of causality enlisted by Hobbes on behalf of peace: the “continuall fear, and danger, of violent death” (89). According to Hobbes, writers who, instead of providing sovereign comforts, stir the “causeless fears” of melancholy undo the power of cau-sality, and they prepare the ground for the biting, snarling, and howling that challenges Hobbes’s project of political humanization.

V. Conclusion

I have suggested that Hobbes’s work can be read as a kind of therapy for a melancholic lycanthropy that is both the occasion (English Civil


War) and the effect of his theory: he animalizes the human being in the state of nature, defines this form of animalistic existence (as well as that of nonhuman animals) as nonpolitical, and proceeds to grant entry to the polity only through the humanizing devices of speech and ratiocination—that he continues to think in creaturely terms.66 Thus his effort to leave behind as unpolitical not only animal forms of life, but also certain human behaviors and affects dangerously linked with animality, seems unable to succeed.

Against humanist scholars of Hobbes I showed, through Burton and Howell, but also through the contemporary work by Fudge, how the wolfish humors of lycanthropy offered a way to conceptualize the political and spiritual malaise of early modern England. I argued that Hobbes’s political theory pays a high price when he tries to help us regain composure: he chases animality away from the realm of politics but stages its return as a symptom through a lycanthrope that roams cemeteries, perhaps (as I have suggested here) in mourning for the death of animality in politics. The suggestion is not only mine. It is invited by Benjamin and Derrida and testified by another of Hobbes’s contemporaries: Margaret Cavendish, a political writer, philosopher, and poet who was Hobbes’s acquaintance. She grasped these symptoms of lycanthropy and their implications when she imagined how a Hobbesian world would be: “When all the parts of this imaginary world came to press and drive each other, they seemed like a company of wolves that worry sheep, or like so many dogs that hunt after hares.”67 She saw the ironic consequence of the fact that Hobbes redrew the human-animal divide to ontologize as human the very creatures he animalized.

As we saw earlier, this ontologizing of the human was further evidenced in, and extended by, Pettit who sought to secure it by way of a two-step process whereby language deanimalizes the human even before leaving the state of nature.68 His efforts are usefully contrasted with those of Giorgio Agamben who, like the humanist republicanism of Pettit and Skinner, is also concerned about the human’s animality in Hobbes’s state of nature. Agamben argues, in Homo Sacer, that Hobbes’s animalization of the human in the natural condition is not merely an argument about “natural life,” but that it introduces a state of exception that is always already lurking in the city.69 According to Agamben, this exception creates a zone of indistinction between wolf and man that can only result in a bare, expendable life.70 But Agamben is wrong to treat the wolf-man in Hobbes as exceptional. On the contrary, the wolf-man is exemplary and shows that, pace Pettit and Agamben, Hobbes is not sure whether there is anything distinctive about human beings at all. Where Agamben sees a dangerous zone of indistinction between wolf and man that is potentially


dehumanizing, I have argued here that we should see Hobbes’s project of contingent political humanization undergoing a self-deconstruction (a vicious circularity) through symptoms of melancholic lycanthropy.

This self-deconstruction of Hobbes’s project is evident when he con-ceptualizes resistance to becoming part of a commonwealth as a sign of something beastly, untamable. In a discussion of three possible ways of leaving the commonwealth and returning to the natural condition (rejection or abdication, a man renounces the commonwealth after social contract; the commonwealth falls under the power of the enemy; there is lack of a successor) Hobbes writes, “And by these three ways, all subjects are restored from their civil subjection to that liberty which all men have to all things; to wit, natural and savage; for the natural state hath the same proportion to the civil (I mean, liberty to subjection), which passion hath to reason, or a beast to a man” (DC 204). This pas-sage presents four oppositions: natural state vs. civil state; liberty vs. subjection; passion vs. reason; and beast vs. man. From the perspective presented in this article, what is revealing in this passage is not just the relation of proportionality assigned to the four sets of oppositions, but the implication that the notions which comprised them are compa-rable. Thus the four pairings not only insist on drawing an allegorical connection between the beast and the state of nature, and the human and the civil state. They also underscore the following problem: any unchecked irruption of the beast in man resembles the reemergence of the natural condition in the civil state, of liberty in subjection, and of passions in reason.

On this reading, then, the melancholic lycanthrope indicates that the eruption of the beast in man interrupts a humanity that is never fully secure. If both reason and humanity are vulnerable to melancholy, it might not be far-fetched to assume that the other two remaining resemblances, subjection and the civil state, might also be affected by this condition. Consequently, the animality of the human being is not only difficult to govern; it might be ungovernable as such—at least in the terms of the commonwealth delineated by Hobbes. Borrelli might be alluding to this beast within when he refers to “an internal part of each subject which will never be possible to govern entirely.”71 This same idea seems to be behind Yves-Charles Zarka’s characterization of the melancholic in Hobbes as antipolitical.72

But we must not leave it there, for Hobbes’s melancholic lycanthrope can only be conceived as antipolitical if we accept the identification of humanity and the political in the terms proposed by humanist readings of Hobbes. By complicating and interrupting the logic of Leviathan, the lycanthrope questions logos and undermines the establishment of


modern political reason. It reminds us that incorporating by means of logos has to sacrifice other ways of incorporating which, when negated, will recur to haunt the contours of human politicality. Despite Hobbes’s efforts, howling and voraciousness return as a reminder and remainder of alternative forms of politics forged under the auspices of a lupine disposition.73 Hobbes was not able to develop this political repertoire himself, but his initial gesture of animalizing the human in the state of nature invites us to do so.

Resituating Hobbes’s work in neglected textual and contextual re-sources of the period, this reading insists on the relevance of Hobbes’s challenge to human exceptionalism and predominance. This challenge persists in, and through, the figure of the wolf-man, whose liminality reminds us of the human being’s animality. Perhaps homo homini lupus means the opposite of what the previous reception of Hobbes has caused us to believe: it means that the lycanthrope, in becoming an animal, inaugurates a form of politics that ceases to be human, all too human.

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

NOTES

The author wishes to thank the Paris Program in Critical Theory, and the Millennium Project N° NS100014 for financial support.1 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 3. Unless indicated, I use the following versions of Hobbes’s texts: “The Citizen [De Cive]” in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 89–386 (hereafter cited in text as DC); Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) (hereafter cited in text as L); “On Man[De Homine]” in Man and Citizen, 33–85 (hereafter cited in text as OM); The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928) (hereafter cited in text as EL); and Behemoth or the Long Parliament, introduction by Stephen Holmes (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990) (hereafter cited in text as B).2 Discussions of lycanthropy in the period include: Jean Bodin, On the Demon-mania of Witches, trans. Randy Scott (1580; Toronto: CRRS Publications, 1995), especially chapter 6; King James I, Demonology (1597; Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2008), 32 and 57; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Kathleen McLuskie and Jennifer Uglow (1613; Bristol: Bristol Classical, 1989); Thomas Adams, “Lycanthropy; or The Wolf Worrying the Lambs,” in The Works of Thomas Adams (1615; Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862), 109–22; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, introduction by William H. Gass (1621; New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 141–42. Contemporary discussions of clinical lycanthropy in psychiatry are: T. A. Fahy, “Lycanthropy: a Review,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 82 (January 1989): 37–39; K. Koehler, H. Ebel, and D. Vartzopoulos, “Lycanthropy and Demonomania: Some Psychopathological Issues,” Psychological Medicine 20 (1990): 629–33. 3 James Howell, “Letter LVIII, December 1, 1644,” in Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ: The Familiar Letters of James Howell, introduction by Agnes Repplier (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), 2:115. In another letter of 1647, Howell also draws on lycanthropy to make sense of the English Civil War: “A bellowing kind of immanity never raged so among men, insomuch


that the whole country might have taken its appellation from the smallest part thereof and be called the Isle of Dogs, for all humanity, common honesty, and that mansuetude, with other moral civilities which should distinguish the rational creature from other animals, have been lost here a good while. . . . [A] kind of wolfish humour hath seized upon most of this people, a true lycanthropy, they so worry and seek to devour one another; so that the wild Arab and the fiercest Tartar may be called civil men in comparison of us” (358).4 Burton, Anatomy, 407, 439.5 Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 2004), 127.6 Several biographers and commentators claim that he was: Oliver Lawson Dick, ed., Aubrey’s Brief Lives (Jaffrey, NH: Davide R. Godine, 1999), 153; Aloysius Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 7, 23; Conal Condren, “The Per-sona of the Philosopher and the Rhetorics of Office in Early Modern England,” in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, ed. Conal Condren et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 84; Arnold W. Green, Hobbes and Human Nature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 26.7 Commentators assume that Hobbes and Burton belong to separate realms of schol-arship: the former to political theory and the latter to the history of psychiatry. But this disciplinary distinction was not always so obvious. Textual evidence shows that Hobbes was conceived as a forerunner of modern psychiatric studies and that Burton was discussed as a political thinker. See: Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860: A History Presented in Selected English Texts (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963) and J. W. Allen, English Political Thought: 1603–1660 (London: Methuen, 1938).8 Robert Yarrow, Soveraigne Comforts for a Troubled Conscience (London: G. Purslowe, 1619).9 Reconstructing a theological understanding of lycanthropy (with emphasis in the French context): Nicole-Jacques Lefèvre, “‘Such an Impure, Cruel and Savage Beast . . .’: Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works,” in Werewolves, Witches and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Beliefs & Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Edwards (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Univ. Press, 2002), 181–98. Approaching lycanthropy as mental illness: James, Demonology, and Burton, Anatomy.10 Harris comments on Hobbes’s use of the organic analogy: Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourse of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 141–43.11 Benjamin quotes Sancho Panza’s dictum: “Sorrow was not ordained for beasts but men yet if men do exceed in it they become beasts” (146). Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003).12 Benjamin, Origin, 144, 156.13 Benjamin, Origin, 144, 150, 152. 14 For a reading of Benjamin that emphasizes his treatment of nonhuman forms of life see: Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings and Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1998). The late Derrida is particularly invested in the deconstructive potential of the question of the animal. See: The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2008) and The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. I (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009).15 See Helen Thornton, State of Nature or Eden? Thomas Hobbes and His Contemporaries on the Natural Condition of Human Beings (Rochester, NY: Univ. of Rochester Press, 2005), especially chapter 3, and Pat Moloney, “Leaving the Garden of Eden: Linguistic and Politi-cal Authority in Thomas Hobbes,” History of Political Thought 18, no. 2 (1997): 242–66. 16 Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London: Martyn, 1670), 126, 125.


17 Sir Robert Filmer, “Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, Upon Mr Hobs Leviathan,” in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 188.18 John Bramhall, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, (Oxford: Parker, 1844), 4:551. 19 Bramhall, Works, 4:95.20 William Lucy, Observations, Censures and Confutations of Notorious Errors in Mr. Hobbes His Leviathan, and His Other Bookes (London: John Grismond, 1663), 142.21 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, “A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr Hobbes’s Book, Entitled Leviathan,” in Leviathan: Contemporary Responses to the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. Rogers (1676; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), 195.22 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678; New York: Gould & Newman, 1838), 310. 23 John Vesey in Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 57. 24 “Social creatures [political animals] are such as have some one common object in view; and this property is not common to all creatures that are gregarious. Such social creatures are man, the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane” (1.1.488a11–488a12). See: Aristotle, “History of Animals,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Transla-tion, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 1:776. On the zoological understanding of Aristotle’s politikon zoon, see: David J. Depew, “Humans and Other Political Animals in Aristotle’s ‘History of Animals’” Phronesis 40, no. 2 (1995): 156–81.25 “And therefore, if the earlier forms of society are natural, so is the state, for it is the end of them, and the nature of a thing is its end.” Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 13. 26 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 101.27 Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 100. 28 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 62.29 Hobbes’s contemporaries were inclined to believe that bees were political animals. The book Feminine Monarchie, by the beekeeper Charles Butler, assumed that bees had a coherent form of political organization that resembled a monarchy under the rule of a queen bee. This book became very popular among English readers reaching three editions (1609, 1623, and 1634) during Hobbes’s life. See: Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie or a Treatise Concerning Bees and the Due Ordering of Them (Oxford: Ioseph Barnes,1609). 30 I draw here on Philip Pettit’s expansive understanding of language in Hobbes. See: Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2008) (hereafter cited in text).31 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), 95.32 Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, foreword by Paul Franco (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1975), 75.33 This intuitive assumption of a human moral provincialism is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. In a challenging article, Kennan Ferguson questions the priorities im-plied in Oakeshott’s spillover effect and argues that our moral allegiances transgress the species boundary. Ferguson points out that faced with the alternative of spending money and time to remedy a family dog’s illness or giving the same amount of time and money

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to a humanitarian cause (Red Cross or UN relief funds for those in need), many would prioritize the well-being of the dog. See: Kennan Ferguson, “I ♥ My Dog,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 373–95. 34 Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 85.35 The spaniel metaphor was common in the period: Karl Josef Höltgen, “Clever Dogs and Nimble Spaniels: On the Iconography of Logic, Invention, and Imagination,” Explo-rations in Renaissance Culture 24 (1998): 1–36. For an approach that focuses on Hobbes’s rhetorical uses of the “wolf motif” see: Cécile Voisset-Veysseyre, “The Wolf Motif in the Hobbesian Text,” Hobbes Studies 23, no. 2 (2010): 124–38.36 Hobbes describes curiosity as “an appetite for knowledge” and suggests that curiosity accounts for “not only the invention of names, but also [for] the suppositions of such causes of all things.” Hobbes, The Elements, 34, 35.37 Anat Biletzki, Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 181 (hereafter cited in text).38 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).39 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).40 But in this case the politics of historical periodization is central. Newman argues that the “baroque” is often excluded by a narrative of progress that transitions from “late Renaissance” to “early modernity.” See: Jane O. Newman, “Periodization, Modernity, Na-tion: Benjamin between Renaissance and Baroque,” Journal of the Northern Renaissance 1, no. 1 (2009): 19–34.41 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 262, 292, and 293.42 On the etymological link between the teuton “wer” and the latin “vir” see: Charlotte F. Otten, “Introduction,” in A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture, ed. Charlotte F. Otten (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986), 5.43 This term is introduced by Kevin Curran in his review essay: “Renaissance Non-humanism: Plants, Animals, Machines, Matter,” Renaissance Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 314–22. 44 Erica Fudge et al., eds., At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Erica Fudge, ed., Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004); Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2006).45 Erica Fudge, “How a Man Differs from a Dog,” History Today, June 5, 2003, http://www.historytoday.com/Erica-fudge/how-man-differs-dog (April 7, 2012).46 Fudge, “How a Man Differs.” 47 Burton, Anatomy, 147. 48 See: Fudge, “How a Man Differs” and “Learning to Laugh: Children and Being Hu-man in Early Modern Thought,” Textual Practice 17, no. 2 (2003): 277–94. 49 See: Lawrence Baab, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580–1642 (1951; East Lansing: Michigan State Univ., 1965), 44; and Carol Falvo Hef-ferman, “That Dog Again: ‘Melancholia Canina’ and Chaucer’s ‘Book of the Duchess,’” Modern Philology 84, no. 2 (1986): 185–90. Benjamin also discusses the dog in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. See Benjamin, Origin, 152.50 Burton, Anatomy, 141.51 Derrida argues that “sovereignty is a circularity, indeed a sphericity. Sovereignty is round; it is a rounding off . . . [it] can take either the alternating form of the by turns, the in turn, the each in turn . . . or else the form of an identity between the origin and the conclusion” (Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005], 13).


52 Richard Ashcraft, “Leviathan Triumphant: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Wild Men,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanti-cism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximilian Novak (Pittsburgh, PA: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 141–82. 53 See Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), 101.54 In contrast with the “eat or be eaten” landscape depicted on the lower right quadrant, the lower left quadrant of the frontispiece shows the peaceful coexistence implied in human agriculture. As Pagden points out, agriculture was often included in seventeenth-century debates on whether Native Americans were fully human. Agriculture was a defining feature of a civilized “human” community, together with the embrace of Christianity. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 91, 142. 55 Norman Jacobson, “The Strange Case of the Hobbesian Man,” Representations 63 (Summer 1998): 1. 56 Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth,” Political Theory 23, no. 2 (1995): 353–75; Robert E. Stillman, “‘Leviathan’: Monsters, Metaphors and Magic,” ELH 62, no. 4 (1995): 791–819.57 See Baab, The Elizabethan Malady, and Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Mel-ancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).58 Gianfranco Borrelli, “Prudence, Folly and Melancholy in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” Hobbes Studies 9 (1996), 89–97.59 Burton, Anatomy, 434.60 Burton quoted in Mauro Simonazzi, “Thomas Hobbes on Melancholy,” Hobbes Studies 19 (2006): 37.61 Burton, Anatomy, 141.62 Benjamin, Origin, 144.63 For a narrative of the myth see Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 27–29. 64 Panofsky and Saxl quoted in Benjamin, Origin, 150.65 Burton, Anatomy, 142.66 Thomas Dumm notes the humanization implied in the practice of speech: “We are prepared to be human by conversation . . . Conversation prevents us from falling down on all fours and howling.” Thomas Dumm, “Wolf-Man and the Fate of Democratic Culture: Four Fragments,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 1, no. 2 (2005): 183.67 Margaret Cavendish, “The Blazing World,” in Political Writings, ed. Susan James (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 74.68 Aware of the humanist bias in his theory, Pettit argues that “while republicanism . . . is decisively anthropocentric, it gives us salient reasons why we should be concerned about other species.” But if the human is always implicated in the domination of creaturely life then we should not just be concerned about other species. We should—on Pettit’s own terms—be concerned that human domination over animals may corrupt humans whose freedom depends on relationships of nondomination, as Pettit repeatedly says. Philip Pet-tit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 137.69 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 106.70 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 106.71 Borrelli, “Prudence, Folly,” 96. 72 Yves-Charles Zarka, “The Political Subject,” in Leviathan after 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorrell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 171.


73 The possibilities opened by this lupine disposition never cease to haunt our contem-porary democratic culture obsessed with the value of free speech. For a contemporary instantiation of the ambivalence between the talking wolf and the talking wolf, see Sarah Hopkins’s piece on the movie “Howl,” based on the famous poem by Allen Ginsberg. Sarah Hopkins, “Howling for Free Speech,” The Harvard Crimson, June 10, 2010, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/10/5/film-ginsbergs-work/ (October 19, 2010).

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Hobbes and the Wolf-Man