Leviathan

by Thomas Hobbes, Christopher Brooke (Editor)

Thomas Hobbes had lived through the Thirty Years War and Britain's civil wars and the horror of what he saw provoked him into thinking in a quite new way - in a world with no safety, with no values beyond violence and greed, how could mankind rescue itself? What form of politics would provide the security which he and his contempories craved?

Vilified and scorned from the moment it was published, Leviathan was publicly burnt for sedition, but ever since it has exercised a unique fascination on its readers - both for its ideas and for its remarkable prose. Its concepts dragged Europe into a new world - one which we still live in today.

This new Penguin Classics edition has a fully revised text and a major new introduction by Christopher Brooke.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Classics, Nonfiction, History, Political Science, School

688 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1651

About the author

Thomas Hobbes was a British philosopher and a seminal thinker of modern political philosophy. His ideas were marked by a mechanistic materialist foundation, a characterization of human nature based on greed and fear of death, and support for an absolute monarchical form of government. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.

He was also a scholar of classical Greek history and literature, and produced English translation of Illiad, Odyssey and History of Peloponnesian War.