ELH

If the body politic, whereby the nature and composition of the civil state is described analogically in terms of the human body, was not a dead metaphor by the early seventeenth century, it was at best in critical condition. It suffered from chronic overexposure before glazed English eyes, and Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606), essentially an elaboration on Jacobean absolutist rhetoric, came close to delivering the coup de grâce. Forset frets that “raunging too far, I be offensivelie tedious, or seeking to match all, I mar all by making more adoo than I need.”¹ Anyone who wades through this account of the seemingly endless correspondences between natural and political parts, forms, functions, fluxes, and diseases is obliged to acknowledge that the author’s fears were not entirely unfounded.

At the same time, it was precisely the trope’s familiarity and conventionality that made it suitable to James I as a vehicle for his bold new defense of the royal prerogative. James was fond of pointing out that “the proper office of a King towards his Subjects, agrees very wel with the office of the head towards the body”: “the head hath the power of directing all the members of the body to that use which the judgement in the head thinkes most convenient.”² He uses the analogy to make popular rebellion against a divinely ordained king seem not only unlawful but “monstrous and unnatural.”³ While it is entirely within the natural order of things that the king crush any insurrection to protect and preserve the whole realm, the reverse is almost unconscionable: “And for the similitude of the head and the body, it may very well fall out that the head will be forced to . . . cut off some rotten members . . . to keep the rest of the body in integritie: but what state the body can be in, if the head, for any infirmitie that can fall to it, be cut off, I leave it to the readers judgement.”⁴ Historical hindsight, of course, enables the reader to judge James’s invocation of the anarchic, headless multitude to be an ironic prophesy of the fate of his son Charles I. For all the exhaustive emphasis on the anatomical similarities between man and the state, the traditional image of the [End Page 497] king’s two bodies rests on a crucial difference: whereas the human body is mortal, the body politic is said to be immortal.⁵ But when the beheading of Charles I brought an end not merely to one particular sovereign’s reign but to the monarchy itself, this distinction was no longer tenable. On 30 January 1649, both of the king’s bodies died on the scaffold.⁶ In that same instant, the conventional meaning of the body politic, so numbingly cliché, became radically destabilized, hence in need of radical revision.

Enter Thomas Hobbes. Imbuing political discourse with more vitality than any other writer that century, Hobbes resuscitated the body trope with newfound vigor, relevance, and sense of purpose. He cast an enormous shadow over his intellectual generation—they all responded to “that Monster, the Father of the Leviathan,” some directly, some indirectly, some with ferocious invective, some with tentative assent, but none with indifference.⁷ This essay argues that Hobbes and his contemporaries, even while making the metaphor of the body politic serve different sociopolitical agendas, arrive at a common goal: the recovery of the civic immortality that seemed irretrievably lost in the era of civil war and regicide. Hobbes clearly understood that the purpose of imagining the state in corporeal form was to suggest not mortal life but eternal life, and in The Elements of Law (1640), his first major work, he framed his analysis accordingly: “But forasmuch as we speak here of a body politic, instituted for the perpetual benefit and defence of them that make it; which therefore men desire should last for ever, I will omit to speak of those that be temporary, and consider those that be for ever.”⁸ James Harrington was similarly concerned with...