Leviathan - The Story of the State

To be man is not just to be an automated machine. Hobbs was not trying to reduce politics to the level of the mechanical. What hobbs was trying to do, in arrente terms, was to use work, artifice, imagination, clever construction skill to build an artificial person. The state will be capable of telling its own stories. And these stories could be imaginative, creative, empowering, fulfilling. Or they could also be terrible and stupid and crass and cruel. But it's a huge difference to say that the state is an artificial version of us rather than saying we are artificial versions of the state.