Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil , commonly referred to as
Leviathan , is a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in 1651 (revised Latin edition 1668). Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.
Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), it argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes wrote that civil war and the brute situation of a state of nature (‘the war of all against all’) could be avoided only by strong, undivided government.
Hobbes proceeds by defining terms clearly and unsentimentally. Good and evil are nothing more than terms used to denote an individual’s appetites and desires, while these appetites and desires are nothing more than the tendency to move toward or away from an object. Hope is nothing more than an appetite for a thing combined with an opinion that it can be had.
He suggests that the dominant political theology of the time, Scholasticism, thrives on confused definitions of everyday words, such as
incorporeal substance, which for Hobbes is a contradiction in terms.
Hobbes describes human psychology without any reference to the
summum bonum, or greatest good, as previous thought had done. According to Hobbes, not only is the concept of a
summum bonum superfluous, but given the variability of human desires, there could be no such thing.
Consequently, any political community that sought to provide the greatest good to its members would find itself driven by competing conceptions of that good with no way to decide among them. The result would be civil war.
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