Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes – ‘Leviathan’ is a work of political philosophy. Written by Thomas Hobbes during a time of civil war, it argues that sovereign rule is the most stable form of government. An early proponent of social contract theory, Hobbes’ observations regarding the dangers of unrestrained individual freedom have influenced generations of thinkers.
Leviathan is an ambitious and highly original work of political philosophy. Claiming that man’s essential nature is competitive and selfish, Hobbes formulates the case for a powerful sovereign—or ‘Leviathan’—to enforce peace and the law, substituting security for the anarchic freedom he believed human beings would otherwise experience. This worldview shocked many of Hobbes’s contemporaries, and his work was publicly burnt for sedition and blasphemy when it was first published. But in his rejection of Aristotle’s view of man as a naturally social being, and in his painstaking analysis of the ways in which society can and should function, Hobbes opened up a whole new world of political science.
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