Not only did I disagree with Hobbes' conclusions, I find his assumptions (his arguments based entirely in Christian perspective) essentially worthless. The only value this tract served to me is to "know thy enemy". This is a classic example of mental circus tricks being used to justify the march of Christian dominance across the globe. I can't think of any written text that I despise more, except perhaps Mein Kempf.Hobbes is my least favorite philosopher. He embodies everything I despise in West...

Since some reviewers here seem to rate this work unfairly low because of their disagreements, ignoring both the importance of Leviathan and the basic power of the argument Hobbes forwards in it, I'll refer a couple of good, measured reviews with history and backdrop also found here-http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...Originally I planned to adapt an essay I wrote at univers...

Both the conclusions and methodology of "Leviathan" are shocking to the modern reader. Writing in the seventeenth century, Hobbes attacked medieval political philosophy and religion. However, unlike the enlightenment philosophers he did not base his arguments on the classical authors of Greece and Rome. Instead he made it clear that he considered them to be as much in the wrong as the medieval scholastics. Thus starting from zero, Hobbes then developed the doctrine that every nation or commonwea...

Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Thomas Hobbes 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. Leviathan ranks as a classic Western work on statecraft comparable to Machia...

PrefaceA Scheme of ReferenceIntroductionA Note on the TextSelect BibliographyChronology--Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and CivillExplanatory NotesIndex of Subjects

hobbes' theory is a misanthropic, elitist vision that humans are basically corrupt, evil and stupid, and must be lead by a far-sighted guardian or "leviathan" which enforces private property relations and prevents people from following their "evil impulses."yikes.

Scared Shitless but Not WitlessIn his autobiography, Thomas Hobbes said that his mother had given “birth to twins: myself and fear”, which might be taken as a very clear hint that Hobbes’s mindset was that of a very pessimistic and distrustful man. And yet, Hobbes was not afraid to voice his opinions on man in general and the organization of what he calls the Common-Wealth in particular with a frankness that does anything but bespeak of fear or pusillanimity at a time when to be frank on matters...

The Open Syllabus Project, the systematic study of over one million college syllabi ranks this book as the seventh most popular book cited by syllabi. After having listened to this book I know exactly why. The Age of Enlightenment starts with this book.It's clear that the project of the Enlightenment was the dialectic of answering the pessimism of Hobbes with the optimism of John Locke. They might not have had to agree with Hobbes, but they had to respond to him.Hobbes is very subtle in some of

This is truly the greatest written political work of all time. It meticulously dissects the areas of the political body and mind, the Leviathan itself, and it also deals with the fundamental properties that enable that political body to work such as human reason, ideology, government and also religion.Every question that I have conceived within the confines of my mind, this book has answered it perfectly and efficiently. It is amazing how Thomas Hobbes has argued, analyzed and even criticized th...

A Monster of a Book12 Oct 2017 Woah, after three weeks I have finally managed to finish the behemoth of a book (which, ironically, Hobbes also wrote a book with that name) and I can now move onto something much lighter. Anyway, there was a time, when I was younger, when I was dreaming of one day getting married, having children, while becoming a hot shot lawyer (is it possible to actually do those two things) that I wanted to read this to my proposed child while he (or she) was still a baby. Min...

Though considered to be one of the most influential works of political thought, this manages to be both tedious and frightening – tedious because of Hobbes’s labored phrasing and protracted reasoning, and frightening because his conclusions have been put into play by stars like Stalin and Pol Pot. In brief, Hobbes argues for a strong central government headed by an absolute sovereign. Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone liking Hobbes, as his take on social contract theory supports the theoretical gr...

Leviathan is a major work of philosophy. Full stop.It's interesting to think that this book is the fundamental root of a lot of ultra-conservative brains. On some level, I can understand this. Hobbes defends the divine right of royal power (to a certain extent) and proceeds to define this power as absolute. Without question, subjects must bow to their masters, under any circumstances. In all this, however, he ultimately says that a monarch's power is granted him by his subjects, for without subj...

Thomas Hobbes discourse on civil and ecclesiatical governance, he analyses this in four parts, firstly via a discourse of man and the first principles of society; secondly he looks at the institution of a commonwealth and varying principles governing such, as here listed: "The sovereign has twelve principal rights:1. because a successive covenant cannot override a prior one, the subjects cannot (lawfully) change the form of government. 2. because the covenant forming the commonwealth results fro...

For the most part, I admire Hobbes even if I disagree with half of what he's saying. The first part of this book appeals to me mostly because both of us acknowledge the inherent shortcomings of human kind. While I can't really deny that there is a "mutual relationship between protection and obedience", I'm my view there is a limit to it. The social contract should not be respected by the populus without complaint or demand. What is needed is a democracy not a tyranny.For the most part, I think i...

In the Leviathan (1651), Hobbes builds on his earlier works to offer his contemporaries the solution to the horrors of the English Civil War: an authoritarian dictatorship. How succesful Hobbes was in convincing his contemporaries is beyond my knowledge, but I do know that Hobbes was treated as a black sheep even after his death. A huge part of this treatment has its origins in Hobbes' materialistic (and, according to contemporarties: atheist) philosophy, but I can't shake the belief that Hobbes...

Hobbes’s Leviathan appears draconian to most Americans who ascribe to classical liberal values. Their rejection of his social contract coincides with an optimistic Lockean faith in the capabilities and moral fortitude necessary for negative liberties to survive. This naïveté in political legitimacy is analogous to the popularity of the New Testament compared to the Old because, while both texts share equal moral instruction, we fervently prefer a loving and forgiving God to a brutal taskmaster.

2020 Review: 5 starsOne of my students refused to engage in discussion group because he didn't "agree with Hobbes." I kind of hope no one wholly agrees with Hobbes. But this re-read (admittedly, something of a skim for the last half), I was forced to admit the truth of what my professor says. "You may disagree with Hobbes's conclusions, but you cannot fault his logic." 2013 Review: 3 stars

Three essential hallmarks of the Hobbesian system are important: the war of each against all, the role of human rationality in ending this; the use of knowledge/science as a basis for societal engineering. His view of the state of nature--that time before government and the state existed--is unsurprising when one understands that he was born in the year of the erstwhile invasion by the Spanish Armada (1588) and lived through civil turmoil and revolution in England throughout his life. Hobbes beg...

It's not hard to see why this is considered so important. He goes one step beyond Machiavelli and just totally blows apart the last remaining shreds of virtue-derived political praxis. Politics no longer has anything to do with the idea of 'the good,' what we have now is a secular system in which we consent to have rulers to protect our own interests, however noble or terrible they may be, because without that framework we'd just live like animals, fighting absolutely everything else in the worl...

3.5 stars. I read this when I was in college during a political science course. I remember thinking it was a good source of discussion/debate in class. I plan to re-read this in the near future and will give a more detailed review at that time.