Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~81,500 words · 387 passages
Cite this work
- APAThomas Hobbes. (n.d.). Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-hobbes/behemoth-or-the-long-parliament
- MLAThomas Hobbes. "Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-hobbes/behemoth-or-the-long-parliament.
- ChicagoThomas Hobbes. Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-hobbes/behemoth-or-the-long-parliament.
What it is about
Behemoth (1668): the history of the English civil war, by Hobbes.
Context and history
If Leviathan is the state, Behemoth is disorder. Hobbes explains how England came to kill its king, and the blame is shared out among preachers, universities and lawyers. Charles II forbade its publication; it appeared posthumously.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
dialogues concerning the memorable civil war in his Majesty's dominions from 1640 to 1660. The first contains the seed of it, certain opinions in divinity and politics. The second hath the growth of it in declarations, remonstrances, and other writings between the King and Parliament published. The two last are a very short epitome of the war itself, drawn out of Mr. Heath's chronicle. There can be nothing more instructive towards loyalty and justice than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war. Your Lordship may do with it what you please. I petition not to have it published. But I pray your Lordship not to desist to be favourable as you have been, to me that am, My Lord, Your Lordship's most humble and obliged servant, THOMAS HOBBES. * BEHEMOTH; *OR, THE LONG PARLIAMENT.* DIALOGUE I. A. If in time, as in place, there were degrees of high and low, I verily believe that the highest of time would be that which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660. For he that thence, as from the Devil's Mountain, should have looked upon the world and observed the actions of men, especially in England, might have had a prospect of all kinds of injustice, and of all kinds of folly, that the world could afford, and how they were produced by their '"dams* hypocrisy and self-conceit, whereof the one is double iniquity, and the other double folly. B. I should be glad to behold that prospect. You that have lived in that time and in that part of your age, wherein men used to see best into good and evil, I pray you to set me (that could not then see so well) upon the same mountain, by the relation of the actions you then saw, and of their causes, pretensions, justice, order, artifice, and event. A. In the year 1640, the government of England was monarchical ; and the King that reigned, Charles, the first of that name, holding the sovereignty, by right of a desc
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