Thomas Hobbes

To read Hobbes on his own terms is to discover a provocative rival to contemporary perspectives on morals and politics, one that challenges widely shared assumptions about the roots of our rights and calls into question common conclusions about the scope of political authority in a society based on the consent of the governed. At the same time, it is to encounter a complement to contemporary perspectives on the liberal state, one that offers a distinctive and powerful basis for the political order that conforms to reason and secures the conditions under which human beings with differing conceptions of the best life can pursue happiness as they each understand it.

Les Elements du droit naturel et politique sont la premiere oeuvre politique de Hobbes. Ecrits en 1640, ils circulerent en manuscrit, juste avant que Hobbes ne rejoigne la France ou il demeurera en exil pendant onze ans pour echapper aux affres de la guerre civile anglaise. La redaction de cet ouvrage est donc directement liee au contexte politique. Pourtant, Hobbes y accomplit une deterritorialisation radicale du politique. Loin de partir comme tous ses predecesseurs de l'histoire ou de la nature, il arrache le politique a l'une et a l'autre pour l'enraciner dans une theorie de la nature humaine. On a sans doute de la peine a mesurer la revolution que constitue une telle decision. Sans doute Hobbes a-t-il pour but d'eclairer ses concitoyens sur les veritables regles qui regissent l'artifice politique et sans lesquelles le corps politique s'ecroule comme un chateau de cartes dans la guerre civile, mais pour y parvenir il faut fonder la politique comme science. Il decontextualise donc le politique pour atteindre son essence et sa verite. C'est la l'audace extreme de cette philosophie a laquelle sont aveugles ceux qui entendent la lire comme s'il s'agissait d'un ecrit de circonstance dont le sens serait entierement reductible au moment de sa redaction. Le present volume comporte la premiere edition critique de ce texte depuis l'edition Tonnies, laquelle se trouve, sur bien des points, corrigee ici. La traduction est en effet fondee sur un etablissement du texte a partir de l'ensemble des manuscrits que nous connaissons. Le texte de base est fourni par le manuscrit qui comporte des corrections autographes de Hobbes. On trouvera aussi des annotations textuelles, historiques et philosophiques qui eclairent la lecture.

UITE mundane pursuits as well as lofty attempts to achieve the extraordinary turn us against each other in tragic, insidious ways. These pursuits give rise to an "invisible hand" that, far from guiding people toward happiness, steers them instead toward confrontation and aggression. People end up literally making war in order to secure a good life. My aim here is to lay bare mechanisms by which our undertakings make aggressors of us. I begin with an analysis of competition, aggression, and related phenomena.

Thomas Hobbes took a new look at the ways in which society should function, and he ended up formulating the concept of political science. His crowning achievement, Leviathan, remains among the greatest works in the history of ideas. Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures as well as methods of science were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world. This edition of Hobbes' landmark work is based on the original text. It incorporates the author's own corrections and retains the period spelling and punctuation, offering both flavorful authenticity and the utmost clarity of expression

`the state of men without civil society is nothing else but a mere war of all against all.' Thomas Hobbes was the first great philosopher to write in English. His account of the human condition, first developed in The Elements of Law, which comprises Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, is a direct product of the intellectural and political strife of the seventeenth century. It is also a remarkably penetrating look at human nature, and a permanently relevant analysis of the fears of self-seeking that result in the war of `each against every man'. In The Elements of Law Hobbes memorably sets out both the main lines of his general philosophy, later augmented in De Corpore, and the moral and political philosophy later made famous in Leviathan. Copies of Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, until 1889 printed as separate works, are rare antiques or scarcely less rare scholarly texts; this is the first complete popular edition. It is here supplemented by chapters from De Corpore and Three Lives, two from Hobbes's original Latin. These have never before been published together in English. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. In addition, it presents the fundamentals of his beliefs about language, epistemology, and an extensive treatment of revealed religion and its relation to politics. Beginning with premises that were sometimes controversial, such as that every human action is caused by the agent's desire for his own good, Hobbes derived shocking conclusions, such as that the civil government enjoys absolute control over its citizens and that the sovereign has the right to determine which religion is to be practiced in a commonwealth. Hobbes's contemporaries recognized the power of the arguments in Leviathan and many of them wrote responses to it. Selections from books by John Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Edward Hyde, George Lawson, William Lucy, Samuel Pufendorf and Thomas Tenison are included in this edition. Leviathan is divided into four parts: In the first part, Of Man, Hobbes presents a view of human beings and of the natural world in general that is materialistic and mechanistic. In the second part, Of Commonwealth, he defends the theory of absolute sovereignty, the view that the government has all the political power and has the right to control any aspect of life. In the third part, Of a Christian Commonwealth, he critiques concepts like revelation, prophets, and miracles in such a way that it becomes doubtful whether they can be rationally justified. In the fourth part, Of the Kingdom of Darkness, he explains various ways in which priestly religion has corrupted religion and transgressed the rights of the sovereign. In this revised edition of Hobbes's classic work, A.P. Martinich improves Hobbes's punctuation for the sake of clarity. He has also added new notes for readers, extensive cross references, and substantial part of Hobbes's reply to Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan