Meghan Robison, Hobbes’s Body Politics: From Life to Accountability in Leviathan – Edinburgh University Press, October 2026

Offers a radical reading of the connection between embodied life and the art of making the Commonwealth in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan

• Revises Hobbes’ Leviathan to emphasise the intertwined roles of life and accountability, challenging their separation in standard interpretations of Hobbes
• Redefines Hobbes’s ‘War of All against All’ as a universal condition where individuals see others as potential enemies within a collective humanity
• Describes accountability as an artificial and practical concept, emerging from collective agreements and maintained through the authority of a sovereign who enforces rules and punishes violations

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.