The Invisible Origins of Legal Positivism: A Re-Reading of a TraditionConklin's thesis is that the tradition of modern legal positivism, beginning with Thomas Hobbes, postulated different senses of the invisible as the authorising origin of humanly posited laws. Conklin re reads the tradition by privileging how the canons share a particular understanding of legal language as written. Leading philosophers who have espoused the tenets of the tradition have assumed that legal language is written and that the authorising