Major Works
Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651)
- Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994.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… MoreThe Elements of Philosophy: De Homine
- Hobbes, Thomas. Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive). Edited by Bernard Gert. Translated by Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991.Thomas Hobbes’s De Homine (Latin for “On Man”) is part of his larger trilogy on political and natural philosophy, which also includes De Cive (“On the Citizen”) and Leviathan. Written in 1658, De Homine delves into… MoreThe Elements of Philosophy: De Cive
- Hobbes, Thomas. Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive). Edited by Bernard Gert. Translated by Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991.Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive (Latin for “On the Citizen”), first published in 1642 and later revised in 1647, is a foundational text in his political philosophy. It serves as a precursor to his more famous work, Leviathan, and systematically… MoreThe Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640)
- Hobbes, Thomas. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.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,… MoreThomas 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. 297-310Zuckert 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