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February 11, 2025 at 5:00 pm ET

Jennifer Greeson, University of Virginia
“Thomas Hobbes, the Virginia Company, and the Invention of Corporate Sovereignty.”

This paper restores Thomas Hobbes’s work for the Virginia Company of London–a historically singular formation chartered by King James I in 1606 to undertake the commodity plantation of North America via private enterprise–into an a arc of his development as a thinker and writer. I closely read three pieces of business Hobbes authored for the territorially-sovereign Company in 1622-23, then suggest how that business practice inflected the beginnings of his mature political philosophy as he laid it out in his 1640 Elements of Law, the forerunner of his 1651 Leviathan. My premise: the new kind of plantation business pursued by a new kind of sovereign corporation required new ways of thinking and knowing. The day-to-day operations of the VCL raised broader moral and political questions that could not be satisfactorily addressed via the western philosophical paradigms available in the 1620s. In order to his job, therefore, young Hobbes had to improvise novel rhetorical strategies and conceptual schemes in real time. These innovations required by his plantation practice later reemerged, in abstracted form, as bases of his political philosophy. The new form of business led him to a new theory of sovereignty—an argument for a new totality of absolutism over human beings—in which the state of nature presents as the initial (invasion) phase of the Virginia plantation project, and Atlantic capitalist enslavement furnishes the model of the political subject.

Jennifer Rae Greeson is associate professor of English and core faculty in American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her book, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature, appeared with Harvard University Press in 2010 and won the Hugh Holman Award of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Her edited volumes have appeared from Norton and the University of Georgia Press; she has held fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Columbia University Society of Fellows, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; and her articles have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, PMLA, African American Review, and elsewhere. Her new book in progress, from which this paper is adapted, is titled Plantation Enlightenment: Extirpation, Enslavement, and the English Business Model of Modernity.