Quentin Skinner and Hobbes's artificial person of the state redux

Quentin Skinner's breakthrough thesis in From Humanism to Hobbes is to trace the immediate context for Hobbes's treatment in Leviathan of the person of the state as artificial (the seat of power) to the parliamentary pamphlets produced since De cive (1642), and partly in response to it. If, instead of allowing Hobbes to metonymize the long history of the birth of the modern state - of which he was such an important part - we take Skinner's cue and treat him, more plausibly, as a theorist engaged in the constitutional debates that surrounded him, then it is incumbent on us to undertake a content analysis, not only of the parliamentary debates, but also of the case law, of his day. Hobbes is uniquely important, just because he did, fortuitously perhaps, arrive at a formulation of the 'artificial person of the state' that has endured. The form in which it has endured, as 'the office of the Crown', is probably not due to Hobbes, but in spite of him. But because the Crown is, in some sense, the first principle of the unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom and of the Commonwealth, it is of considerable importance in the current constitutional crisis induced by Brexit.