According to Hobbes, a commonwealth can only occur when the natural multitude of men are made one thanks to a covenantal device. The artificial unity of the political community can be seen as strengthened by the use of concepts that reflect some natural unity, such as “body” or “person”. Both notions can indeed be found in Hobbes’s political treatises, but the degree of importance attached to them varies greatly. The key to this evolution is to be found in De cive , where Hobbes explicitly dismisses the notion of a body politic and substitutes the concept of person for it. This paper examines the significance of this conceptual change by following its trajectory from Elements of Law to Leviathan and discussing its implications for Hobbes’s understanding of civil unity.

中文翻译：

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代表和国家的人

根据霍布斯的说法，只有当自然而然的众多人由于圣约的安排而成为一个时，共同体才会出现。政治共同体的人为统一可以被视为通过使用反映某种自然统一的概念来加强，例如“身体”或“人”。这两个概念确实可以在霍布斯的政治论文中找到，但对它们的重视程度差别很大。这种演变的关键可以在 De cive 中找到，在那里霍布斯明确地摒弃了政治体的概念，并用人的概念代替了它。本文通过遵循其从法律要素到利维坦的轨迹并讨论其对霍布斯对公民​​统一的理解的影响，来检验这一概念变化的重要性。