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Circulation of Blood and Money in Leviathan – Hobbes on the Economy of the Body

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History of Economic Rationalities

Part of the book series: Ethical Economy ((SEEP,volume 54))

Abstract

Metaphors played an indispensable role in the development and legitimization of early modern economic rationalities. One of the most prevalent metaphors described the state as a body, a strong expression of which is found in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). But both the concept of the state and the body were constantly being reconfigured in this period. In this chapter, I argue that Hobbes’ conception of economy as a closed system of circulation ensuring the health and life of the state gained its specific character as a product of Hobbes’ dependency on William Harvey’s anatomical theory of the circulation of blood for his description of the state as a body. For Harvey, a proper circulation of blood was what ensured the life of the animal body, and thus for Hobbes the economy understood as circulation of money was nothing but a means to ensure the life of the political body.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Charleton lifted this analogy directly from Sir Kenelm Digby, who had witnessed the mint at Segovia at work, cf. Sawday (1983, 28–33; 1995, 242–244) and Thomson (2008, 46).

  2. 2.

    For analyses of the body-machine metaphor in early modern natural philosophy, see Duchesneau (1998), Des Chene (2001), Shapiro (2003) and Smith (2011). For the reception of L’Homme, see the essays collected in Antoine-Mahut and Gaukroger (2016).

  3. 3.

    For the discursive role played by the concept of circulation in economic and political thought of seventeenth century England, see Johnson (1966), Finkelstein (2000), Desmedt (2005), Glaisyer (2005), Hont (2005) and Wennerlind (2011). Mirowski (1994), Riskin (2003), and Schabas (2005) make strong cases for the interdependency of economic and natural-philosophical thought in the early modern period.

  4. 4.

    For Hobbes’ use of a monster in his description of the state, see Stillman (1995). For the shifting epistemic roles played by monsters in the early modern period, see Daston and Park (1981, 1998, ch. 5).

  5. 5.

    Although the range and purity of Descartes’ mechanism when it comes to living bodies, especially, is a pressing point in recent scholarship on Descartes. See (Hutchins et al. 2016) for an overview of these debates.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Christoffer Basse Eriksen

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  1. Christoffer Basse Eriksen
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Correspondence to Christoffer Basse Eriksen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Jakob Bek-Thomsen

  2. Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Christian Olaf Christiansen

  3. Institute for Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen

  4. Institute for Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Mikkel Thorup

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Eriksen, C.B. (2017). Circulation of Blood and Money in Leviathan – Hobbes on the Economy of the Body. In: Bek-Thomsen, J., Christiansen, C., Gaarsmand Jacobsen, S., Thorup, M. (eds) History of Economic Rationalities. Ethical Economy, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52815-1_4

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