Who's Afraid of the Big Bear? Hobbes versus Pitkin on Political Representation

Constructivist approaches to political representation are on the rise. Rather than taking Hanna Pitkin's conceptualisation of representation as their foil, constructivists tend to present themselves as exploring and deepening original Pitkinian insights. In this paper, I propose to assess the limits of this self-fashioning. This takes me back to the first systematic theorist of political representation: Thomas Hobbes. Pitkin constructed her understanding of political – i.e., democratic – representation partly against Hobbes. An examination of what haunted Pitkin in Hobbes’s deeply performative view of representation should yield fundamental clues as to her unstated assumptions and the limits of her purported “constructivism”. In returning to Hobbes, I also hope to open up to two questions of larger import, given the dead-ends constructivists are facing: Would constructivists benefit from retrieving some of the lines of argument that Hobbes’s set in motion and Pitkin shunned from? Equally, should they pay closer attention to some of the reasons for Pitkin’s unease?