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… More

• The 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… More

• The 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

• Community and Civil Society [1887]

  - Ferdinand Toennies (Margaret Hollis, trans., Jose Harris, ed., Cambridge, 2001)
  Tönnies’ Community and Civil Society (first published in 1887 as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) is a classic of social and political theory, exploring the tension between close-knit “communities” and an emerging global market… More

• “Thomas Hobbes’ Dialectic of Desire”

  - Gary Herbert, The New Scholasticism, v. 50,  no. 2 (1976): 137-163
  From the conclusion of the paper: “The central claim of the present paper has been that Hobbes’ philosophy proceeds by virtue of a dynamic, dialectical conception of nature, a conception which, I believe has its own origins in his thoughts about… More

• “Fear of Death” by Gary Herbert

  - Herbert, Gary. "Fear of Death and the Foundations of Natural Right in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes." Hobbes Studies 7, no. 1 (1994): 56–68.    
  Herbert’s article “Fear of Death and the Foundations of Natural Right in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes” examines how Hobbes’s understanding of human fear influences his conception of natural rights and the establishment of political… More

• “Hobbes’s Psychology”

  - Bernard Gert, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Tom Sorell, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 157-174
  An investigation of Hobbes’ determinism and the interaction of reason and passion in Hobbes’ moral philosophy.  The author denies that Hobbes was simply a psychological egoist.

• Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics

  - Phillip Pettit (Princeton University Press, 2009)
  Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis–the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes’s story, is a double-edged… More