Abstract
On his own account, Hobbes was preoccupied with living a secure life. Fear of violent death informs all that he wrote about politics. In the absence of strong government, he contended, men and women would be in constant fear of their lives. In that belief, he argued for the establishment of absolute sovereignty, preferably in the form of absolute monarchy, and he defended such government against claims of limits upon it. Civil war, he thought, begins in such claims, and civil war is the greatest misfortune that can befall a people.
Among the many questions taken up in the bibliographical essay are the coherence of Hobbes’s explanation of the establishment of the sovereign, the relationship between his political and moral philosophy and his metaphysics and epistemology, and the function he accords religion and the church in Leviathan. A bibliography of over 200 entries identifies the volumes published in the Clarendon edition of Hobbes’s works, which will supersede Molesworth as the standard. It also lists the many collections of commentary as well as monographs and articles.
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Notes
- 1.
In the writing of this sketch, I have drawn upon A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Miriam Reik, The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977); and Arnold Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York: Norton, 1986).
- 2.
John Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Oliver Lawson Dick, ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), 154.
- 3.
“Verse Life” in J. C. A. Gaskin, ed. The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 254.
- 4.
“Preface to the Reader” of De Cive in Bernard Gert, ed. Man and Citizen (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).
- 5.
Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Dick, ed. 150.
- 6.
Arnold Rogou, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York: Norton, 1986), 47 and 259n5.
- 7.
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 101 and 106.
- 8.
Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Dick, ed. 150.
- 9.
Elements of Law, XX. 5.
- 10.
“Prose Life” in Gaskin, Elements of Law, 247.
- 11.
De Cive, Gert, ed., 116.
- 12.
Charles Carlton, The Experience of the British Civil Wars (London: Routledge, 1992), 211–214; and Trevor Royle, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1660 (London: Abacus, 2006), 602.
- 13.
As quoted by Martinich, 163–164.
- 14.
“Verse Life” in Gaskin, Elements of Law, 258.
- 15.
The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Sir William Molesworth, ed. (11 vs.; London: Bohn, 1839–1845), VII, 471 and I, ix.
- 16.
“Verse Life” in Gaskin, Elements of Law, 260.
- 17.
Quoted by Reik, Golden Lands, 178–179.
- 18.
Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes and the Royal Society” in his Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 317–335; Quentin Skinner, “Thomas Hobbes and the Nature of the Early Royal Society,” Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 217–239; and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) all take up the subject.
- 19.
Malcolm, Aspects, 328.
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Bookman, J.T. (2019). Leviathan . In: A Reader’s Companion to The Prince, Leviathan, and the Second Treatise. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02880-0_3
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