Major Works

• Behemoth, or the Long Parliament [written 1668, published 1682]

  - University of Chicago Press, 1990 (Ferdinand Toennies, ed.)
  Behemoth is Hobbes’s account of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s.  It is an important book in helping us consider how the experience of the wars influenced Hobbes’s thinking, and how he would later interpret the wars through the perspective of the… More

Other Works

• The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, Volume 1 (1622-1659)

  - Oxford University Press, 1994 (Noel Malcom, ed.)
  This volume includes correspondence with members of the Cavendish family, René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry Stubbe, and Samuel Sorbière.  In this edition by Noel Malcolm, the letters are presented in their original languages and… More

• The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, Volume 2 (1660-1679)

  - Oxford University Press, 1998 (Noel Malcolm, ed.)
  This volume includes correspondence with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, Cosimo de’Medici, King Charles II, John Aubrey, Anthony Wood, William Crooke, François du Verdus, and Samuel Sorbière.  In this edition by Noel Malcolm, the letters… More

Commentary

• The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke [1962]

  - C. B. MacPherson (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  This work by C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins… More

• On the Sovereign Authorization

  - Clifford Orwin, "On the Sovereign Authorization," Political Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Feb. 1975).
  Excerpt: HOBBES IS, as others have shown, the founder of the modern notion of representation. He does not, however, speak exclusively of “representation,” and “personation” and “standing-for,” but of… More

• History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes

  - Robert P. Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes, Cornell University Press, 1990.

• “The Reception of Hobbes”

  - Mark Goldie, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700 (J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 589-615
  Goldie provides a summary of contemporary and near-contemporary reactions to Hobbes.

• Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes

  - Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
  Using, for the first time, the full range of manuscript as well as printed sources, Skinner documents an entirely new view of Hobbes’ intellectual development, and reexamines the shift from a humanist to a scientific culture in European moral and… More

• Aspects of Hobbes by Noel Malcolm

  - Malcolm, Noel. Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  These essays are the fruit of many years’ research by one of the world’s leading Hobbes scholars. Noel Malcolm offers succinct introductions to Hobbes’s life and thought and studies of many different aspects of his political philosophy, his… More

• Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England

  - David Wootton (Hackett, 2003)
  An anthology of political thought drawn from England’s ‘century of revolution’ that focuses on the writings of those English theorists, essayists, speech writers, tract writers, and pamphleteers to whom Hobbes and Locke were immediately… More

• Hobbes and Republican Liberty

  - Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
  Skinner offers a comparison of two rival theories about the nature of human liberty. The first originated in classical antiquity, and lay at the heart of the Roman republican tradition of public life.  According to Skinner, Thomas Hobbes was the most… More

• The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

  - Samuel I. Mintz (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
  Mintz, in examining these seventeenth-century reactions to Hobbes, sets him against his intellectual background and so gives an added dimension to his thought, captures the ideological excitement of the seventeenth-century critics, and reawakens the crucial… More

• Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life

  - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (Princeton University Press, 2011)
  Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation… More

• Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity: A Quarrel of the Civil Wars and Interregnum

  - Nicholas D. Jackson (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  This 2007 book was the first full account of one of the most famous quarrels of the seventeenth century, that between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and the Anglican archbishop of Armagh, John Bramhall (1594-1663). This analytical narrative… More

• Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan

  - Noel Malcolm (Clarendon Press, 2012)
  This is a three-volume critical edition based on a study of the manuscript and printing history of the Leviathan.  The first volume contains Malcolm’s introduction, which gives an account of the Leviathan’s context, sources, and textual history.  The… More