Major Works

• Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil [1651]

  - Hackett, 1994 (Edwin Curley, ed.)
  The Leviathan is Hobbes’s masterwork, published in 1651. It contains four parts: “Of Man,” “Of Commonwealth,” “Of a Christian Commonwealth,” and “Of the Kingdom of Darkness.” “Of Man” connects… More

• The Elements of Philosophy: De Homine

  - Hackett, 1991 (Bernard Gert, ed. -- contains De Cive and selections of De Homine)
  The Elements of Philosophy is composed of three parts, not published in their intended order. De Homine, which was published in 1658, opens with ten chapters on optics. The last five chapters, treating Hobbes’s accounts of the passions and an analysis of… More

• The Elements of Philosophy: De Cive

  - Hackett, 1991 (Bernard Gert, ed. -- contains De Cive and selections of De Homine)
  The Elements of Philosophy is composed of three parts, not published in their intended order. De Cive, published in 1642, was Hobbes’s first definitive articulation of his political philosophy. It includes Hobbes’s account of the state of nature and the… More

• The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic [1640]

  - Oxford University Press, 2008 (Human Nature and de Corpore Politico, J.C.A. Gaskin, ed.)
  This is Hobbes’s first published philosophical work (1640), which was written in part in response to the conflicts between Charles I and Parliament. The book represents Hobbes’s initial attempt to address political matters with the deductive methods of… More

Commentary

• Second Treatise of Government [1689]

  - John Locke (C. B. Macpherson, ed., Hackett, 1980)
  Locke’s Second Treatise, one of the great texts in the history of liberal political thought and a great influence on the American founders, is simultaneously a continuation of Hobbes’ thought and a criticism of Hobbes’ scheme.  Like Hobbes,… More

• Thomas Hobbes: the Unity of Scientific and Moral Wisdom

  - Gary B. Herbert (University of British Columbia, 1989)
  It is generally believed that Hobbes’s mechanistic physics is at odds with his notorious egoistic psychology, and that the latter cannot support his prescriptive moral theory.  In this book Gary B. Herbert sets forth a new interpretation of Hobbes’s… More

• “Hobbes, Locke, and the Problem of the Rule of Law”

  - Michael Zuckert, in Launching Liberalism: on Lockean Political Philosophy (University Press of Kansas, 2002), pp. 297-310
  Zuckert traces a contemporary disagreement among “Hobbesian” and “Lockean” scholars of constitutional law back to a disagreement over the moral foundations of law, the relation of ends and means, and the possibility of appealing from… More