LEVIATHAN By Thomas Hobbes – 1651 Paperback

Description

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 94 – Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Thomas Hobbes’s essay on the social contract is both a founding text of western thought and a masterpiece of wit and imagination

According to the 17th-century historian and gossip John Aubrey, Thomas Hobbes “was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.” As a great thinker, Hobbes epitomises English common sense and the amateur spirit, and is all the more appealing for deriving his philosophy from his experience as a scholar and man of letters, a contemporary and occasional associate of Galileo, Descartes and the young Charles Stuart, prince of Wales, before the Restoration.

Hobbes himself was born an Elizabethan, and liked to say that his premature birth in 1588 was caused by his mother’s anxiety at the threat of the Spanish Armada:

… it was my mother dear
Did bring forth twins at once, both me, and fear.

Throughout his long life, Hobbes was never far either from the jeopardy of the times (notably the thirty years’ war and the English civil war) or the jeopardy sponsored by the brooding realism and pragmatic clarity of his philosophy. What, asked Hobbes, was the form of politics that would provide the security that he and his contemporaries longed for, but were always denied?
frontispeice of leviathan by thomas hobbes
The famous frontispiece to Leviathan. Photograph: Alamy

Subtitled The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Leviathan first appeared in 1651, during the Cromwell years, with perhaps the most famous title page in the English canon, an engraving of an omnipotent giant, composed of myriad tiny human figures, looming above a pastoral landscape with sword and crosier erect.

Thus “the Leviathan” (sovereign power) entered the English lexicon, and Hobbes’s vision of man as not naturally a social being, animated by a respect for community, but a purely selfish creature, motivated by personal advantage, became condensed into his celebrated summary of mankind’s existence as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”.

It was Hobbes’s argument that, to ameliorate these conditions, man should adopt certain “Laws of Nature” by which human society would be forbidden to do “that which is destructive” of life, whereby virtue would be the means of “peaceful, sociable and comfortable living.”