In the Library
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes, 1651
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 49
- Length
- Length 212k words
£1.99
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The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
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If you like this, try
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli teaches a prince how to seize and hold power, while Hobbes explains why the rest of us would ever agree to grant a sovereign that power at all.
£1.99
The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau inherits Hobbes's idea of a contract between ruler and ruled, but insists man is born free and it is society, not nature, that makes him brutish.
£1.99
About the book
A crowned giant rises over the landscape, his torso composed of hundreds of small human figures, sword in one hand and crozier in the other. Thomas Hobbes engraved this frontispiece onto his 1651 treatise of political philosophy, written in Paris exile during the English Civil War while Cromwell's armies redrew the map at home. Outside the commonwealth, Hobbes argued, men live in a state of nature where every hand is against every other and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Only the social contract, surrendering all rights to an absolute sovereign, can save the species from war of all against all. Reason, fear, and the appetite for peace stitch the great body together; the giant is the multitude, made one.