Leviathan
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~220,000 words · 1,032 passages
Cite this work
- APAThomas Hobbes. (n.d.). Leviathan. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-hobbes/leviathan
- MLAThomas Hobbes. "Leviathan." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-hobbes/leviathan.
- ChicagoThomas Hobbes. Leviathan. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thomas-hobbes/leviathan.
What it is about
Why there must be a State: without a common power to keep us in awe, human life is a war of all against all — and the way out is a covenant by which we surrender our force to a sovereign who guarantees peace.
Context and history
Published in London in 1651, just after the English Civil War had beheaded a king and left the country exhausted. Hobbes had written it in exile in Paris, where he tutored the future Charles II in mathematics. It achieved the rare feat of enraging everyone at once: republicans for its absolutism, royalists for grounding sovereignty in a covenant rather than in God, and the Church for its materialism. It is the book with which modern political philosophy begins: the whole later tradition, from Locke to Rawls, is in large part a reply.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
LEVIATHAN OR THE MATTER, FORME, & POWER OF A COMMON-WEALTH ECCLESIASTICAL AND CIVILL Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Printed for Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1651. This E-text was prepared from the Pelican Classics edition of Leviathan, which in turn was prepared from the first edition. I have tried to follow as closely as possible the original, and to give the flavour of the text that Hobbes himself proof-read, but the following differences were unavoidable. Hobbes used capitals and italics very extensively, for emphasis, for proper names, for quotations, and sometimes, it seems, just because. The original has very extensive margin notes, which are used to show where he introduces the definitions of words and concepts, to give in short the subject that a paragraph or section is dealing with, and to give references to his quotations, largely but not exclusively biblical. To some degree, these margin notes seem to have been intended to serve in place of an index, the original having none. They are all in italics. He also used italics for words in other languages than English, and there are a number of Greek words, in the Greek alphabet, in the text. To deal with these within the limits of plain vanilla ASCII, I have done the following in this E-text. I have restricted my use of full capitalization to those places where Hobbes used it, except in the chapter headings, which I have fully capitalized, where Hobbes used a mixture of full capitalization and italics. Where it is clear that the italics are to indicate the text is quoting, I have introduced quotation marks. Within quotation marks I have retained the capitalization that Hobbes used. Where italics seem to be used for emphasis, or for proper names, or just because, I have capitalized the initial letter of the words. This has the disadvantage that they are not then distinguished from those that Hobbes capitalized in pla