© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi 10.1163/18750257- bja10016 hobbes studies 33 (2020) 153-175 brill.com/hobs The Sleeping Subject: On the Use and Abuse of Imagination in Hobbes’s Leviathan Avshalom M. Schwartz Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA avshalom@stanford.edu Abstract This paper offers a novel interpretation of the political implications of Hobbes’s theory of imagination and his solution to the threat posed by the imagination to political stability. While recent work has correctly identified the problem the imagination poses for Hobbes, it has underestimated the severity of the problem and, accordingly, has underestimated the length to which the Hobbesian sovereign will have to go in order to solve it. By reconstructing Hobbes’s account of sleep and the operation of the imagi- nation during sleep, this paper argues that the Hobbesian sovereign who seeks to solve the problem of the imagination must maintain his subjects in a ‘state of sleep,’ by pre- venting any kind of new inputs from disturbing their imagination. This solution sug- gests that the citizens of the Leviathan state are not sleeping sovereigns, but rather sleeping subjects. Keywords Hobbes – Leviathan – imagination – sleep – censorship – political stability In his 1658 The Catching of Leviathan or The Great Whale, John Bramhall, one of the many fierce critics of Hobbes’s Leviathan, wrote that: I do believe there never was any Author Sacred or Profane, Ancient or Moderne, Christian, Jew, Mahometan, or Pagan, that hath inveighed so frequently and so bitterly against all feigned phantasms, with their first de- vises, maintainers, and receivers, as T. H. hath done, excluding out of the