After more than 350 years, the first critical edition of Hobbes’s “Leviathan”
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford University Press; 2,355 pages; $375 and £195. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
A modern materialism, as opposed to the ancient materialism of Democritus, was one of Hobbes’s two main philosophical innovations. The other was a novel way to see government: Hobbes’s method in political philosophy was the opposite of Utopianism. Instead of describing an ideal society, as Plato does in “The Republic”, Hobbes starts by imagining the horrors of a lawless world, where everyone is left to fend for themselves. The result, as he famously wrote, would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” To avoid this result, man must cede his natural right of self-defence, and much else, to a sovereign authority with very broad powers, preferably an absolute monarch. Anything less leads to hellish consequences.Mais
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