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Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall

Abstract This article compares two different primal scenes which give rise to human sovereignty: Hobbes's state of nature and Milton's Edenic paradise. The article briefly compares key differences but its main focus is to uncover surprising resonances between Milton and Hobbes. It does so to reveal two under-appreciated aspects of Hobbes's account of sovereignty. The first, drawing on James Martel's reading of Leviathan, is that Hobbes's terrestrial sovereignty is not of itself (and does not lead to) a culmination of human potential, but rather exists within a wider eschatology awaiting the second coming of Christ. The second, drawing on the work of Peter Fitzpatrick, is that Hobbes is ambivalent on the crucial question of whether the founding event is actually transformative (an ambivalence he shares with Milton). The article concludes by departing from Martel's view that Leviathan points towards a non-sovereign politics and argues instead that it contains the seeds of a radical re-conception of sovereignty itself.