Abstract

Hobbes rejects the Aristotelian political animal, a move that enables a malleable psychology in which we are driven by our passions and responses to external objects. Our psychology is accordingly overdetermined by our socio-cultural environment, and managing that environment becomes a central task of the state. A particular problem is what I call the “ontological illusion,” the constitutive human tendency to ontologize products of the imagination. I argue that Hobbes’s strategies for managing the ontological illusion govern part four of Leviathan. Those chapters are intended to convince elites that crediting ontological illusions in policy is disastrous, as his discussion of demonology and its thinly veiled references to witchcraft persecutions readily illustrates.