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´The life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short´

Written during the chaos of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes´ Leviathan asks how, in a world of violence and horror, can we stop ourselves from descending into anarchy? Hobbes´ case for a ´common-wealth´ under a powerful sovereign - or ´Leviathan´ - to enforce security and the rule of law, shocked his contemporaries, and his book was publicly burnt for sedition the moment it was published. But his penetrating work of political philosophy - now fully revised and with a new introduction for this edition - opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world.

Edited with a new introduction by Christopher Brooke

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Hobbes, Thomas
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, he studied at Oxford and spent most of his life employed by the aristocratic Cavendish family. His publications included a translation of Thucydides´ History of the Peloponnesian War (1629); a comprehensive philosophical system set out in his trilogy, De Corpore (1655), De Homine (1658), and De Cive (1642); and the major statement of his political theory, Leviathan (1651). He died at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire.´

Brooke, Christopher
Christopher Brooke is a lecturer at Cambridge University in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and author of Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (2012).

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