Leviathan

‘He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind.’

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is not just one of the greatest philosophical texts in the English language; it is one of the most important works in the history of Western political thought. Almost every major tradition in the centuries after Hobbes – from radical democracy to authoritarianism – has been influenced by its arguments. Written in exile in a period of dramatic developments – civil war and regicide – Leviathan is in some ways the product of its own special circumstances. And yet, at the same time, it deals with fundamental issues that matter to all of us today: the nature and purpose of the state, the relation between human nature and politics, the idea of natural rights, the justification of authority, the concept of representation, the nature of sovereignty, the limits of obedience, and the relationship between religious obligations and human ones.

This new edition offers a definitive text drawn from more than twenty years of research by Noel Malcolm, including, in English translation, all the most significant revisions made in Hobbes’s later Latin translation of Leviathan, as well as extensive explanatory notes that elucidate Hobbes’s language and identify the many Biblical, classical, and other allusions that are scattered through his text.