Hobbes’ mechanical politics erased the poor by aligning state metaphor with a market economy

Evidence

Whereas in Salisbury’s Policraticus the body was endowed with life and ruled by the prince who together with the clergy constituted its soul, the great Leviathan is “but an artificial man … in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul” giving not vital life but artificial motion. In Salisbury’s organism, the judges and governors who communicated with the people represented its sense organs; in Hobbes’ machine state the magistrates and judges were, instead, its artificial joints. For Salisbury, the senate held the position of the heart and represented the good of the commonwealth; Hobbes assigned the heart (a spring) no human function whatever and dispensed rewards and punishment through the nerves. For Salisbury, the prince embodied wisdom and used it to restrain the arms of the organism; for Hobbes, equity and laws, formed an artificial reason. In Policraticus, the financiers in the intestinal tract dispensed the state’s finances being wary of anal hoarding; in Leviathan, the accumulation of wealth and riches of all the members constituted the strength of the artificial man while business assured its safety. The feet, which were the multitudes of common people for Salisbury, having no riches to contribute were not even mentioned by Hobbes. The Hobbesian metaphor thus not only became completely mechanical but was also fully consistent with a description of a market economy, the strength and operation of which depended on money exchanges and quantitative calculations. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 820

Categorization

• XREF: Parallel to the sumptuary-law and class-erasure threads from ch45, and the organic-social-hierarchy discussions of ch23 — the state metaphor’s class content.