Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes

University of Chicago Press, 1997 (Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse, eds.)

Hobbes may have been the author of the three essays printed here (“A Discourse Upon the Beginning of Tacitus,” “A Discourse of Rome,” and “A Discourse of Laws”), which, together with twelve other pieces, were published anonymously in 1620 under the title Horae Subsecivae (Leisure Hours).

The editors of this volume, Noel Reynolds and Arlene Saxonhouse, establish reasonably solid evidence for Hobbes’s authorship on the basis of a statistical analysis (“wordprint”) of the text.  This volume includes an essay by the editors on Hobbes and the Horae Subsecivae, an essay by Saxonhouse on Hobbes’s place in modern political thought, and a short piece on the technique of “wordprinting.”

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