Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
