Leviathan

What It Is

An English treatise of 1651, composed in Paris while Hobbes waited out a civil war that had already killed his king and a substantial fraction of the population. It is not a work of consolation.

Four parts. The first, Of Man, builds a materialist account of sensation, appetite, speech and reasoning. The second, Of Commonwealth, derives a politics from it. The third and fourth turn to scripture, the church and what Hobbes calls the Kingdom of Darkness, and together they take up nearly half the book.

The prose is among the best in English: definitional, contemptuous, and frequently very funny. Hobbes fixes his terms and then holds you to them for seven hundred pages, and most of his arguments are won before you notice they have started.

Why It Matters

This is the founding text of the modern state. Sovereignty, the social contract, the state of nature, and the claim that political authority is manufactured by the people who submit to it rather than handed down from heaven: all of it is here first, and everything after is either building on Hobbes or arguing with him. Locke, Rousseau, Kant, the whole liberal tradition, defines itself against a man it cannot get around.

He also gave political thought its method. Start from what human beings actually are, made of appetite and fear and language, and reason forward. Do not start from what they ought to be.

Everyone knows the phrase about life being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Almost nobody knows what it is doing there. What it is actually describing, and how close to home he meant it, is one of the shocks of reading him, and he had just watched a version of it from across the Channel.

Before You Read

Seven hundred pages, twenty-five to thirty hours, difficult but never obscure. The friction is seventeenth-century English and Hobbes's insistence on his own definitions, not obscurity of thought.

Parts I and II are what most readers come for and are worth reading properly, chapter by chapter. Parts III and IV are commonly skimmed, and skimming them entirely is a mistake worth understanding: half of Leviathan is an argument about how to read the Bible. Nobody tells you that, and the omission has made Hobbes look far more modern than he is.

Look at the frontispiece before you begin. The sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny people was designed to Hobbes's own instructions, and it is an argument, not a decoration.

Which Edition to Read

• Edwin Curley (Hackett, 1994) — recommended. The most thoughtfully made reading edition of this book: spelling and punctuation modernised, a glossary of seventeenth-century usage, and the significant variants from Hobbes's later Latin version set alongside the English so you can see him revising himself. Curley's introduction is the best short account of what Hobbes is doing. The cost: modernisation costs something, and the apparatus makes for a crowded page. View on Amazon →
• Richard Tuck (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, revised 1996). Keeps Hobbes's original spelling and punctuation, which matters more often than you would think, since his emphasis frequently rides on a comma. The standard text in political theory courses. The cost: the old orthography slows a first reader, and the notes are thin.
• Noel Malcolm (Clarendon Press, three volumes, 2012). The critical edition, with the English and Latin texts face to face and an editorial introduction of monumental scale. The cost: it costs more than every other book in this batch combined, and it is not something you read in an armchair.

Take Curley to read, Tuck if you want Hobbes's own page, Malcolm if you are going to spend years here.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the definitions slowly. Hobbes wins by defining, and if you nod through Chapter 4 on speech you will find yourself agreeing to things in Chapter 17 that you would have refused had you been paying attention.

Curley's introduction is a rare case where you should read it first. It is contextual and analytical, and it will save you a great deal of confusion.

Do not treat Part I as psychology you can skip on the way to the politics. It is the foundation, and Hobbes built the rest of the house on it precisely so that you could not remove it.

Finish with the Review and Conclusion. It tells you what he thought he had done, and why he thought it was urgent.