Repressive Egalitarianism
This chapter sketches Hobbes’s solution to the political problem, and interprets its meaning and significance for the question of popular power. Hobbes’s preferred model of politics, ‘repressive egalitarianism’, overcomes the political problem by breaking down the power blocs of the multitude into disempowered equality. The result is practically workable, but highly ambivalent to contemporary sensibilities. On the one hand, its elimination of informal oligarchy grounds its claim to meaningfully express popular power; the chapter offers a novel interpretation of Hobbes’s famous hostility to democratic assembly in light of this problem of informal oligarchy. But on the other hand, the resultant fragmented polity is unable to resist sovereign overreach.