Hobbes's Body Politics: From Life to Accountability in Leviathan

Reconstructing the conceptual link between life and accountability, Meghan Robison presents a new account of political founding and obligation in Hobbes. Beginning from an interpretation of life as an idiosyncratic bodily motion – a motion of limbs that begins within a living body – she shows how the Commonwealth is instituted through our self‑legislated embodied practices of holding ourselves to mutually beneficial shared rules.