Commentary

• The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol [1938]

  - Carl Schmitt (George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, trans., The University of Chicago Press, 2008)
  One of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt is a deeply controversial figure who has been labeled both Nazi sympathizer and modern-day Thomas Hobbes. First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of… More

• Hobbes on Civil Association [1975]

  - Michael Oakeshott (Liberty Fund, 2000)
  This volume consists of Michael Oakeshott’s four principal essays on Hobbes and on the nature of civil association as civil association pertains to ordered liberty. The essays are “Introduction to Leviathan” (1946); “The Moral Life in the Writings of… More

• The Rhetoric of Leviathan

  - David Johnston (Princeton University Press, 1989)
  Contending that modern readers do Leviathan an injustice by neglecting its metaphysical and theological themes, David Johnston supports his claim with a detailed examination of the text as a whole and with a reinterpretation of the genesis of the work.

• “‘I durst not write so boldly’ or, How to Read Hobbes’ Theological-Political Treatise”

  - Edwin Curley, in Hobbes e Spinoza, (Daniela Bostrenghi, ed., intr. by Emilia Giancotti, Bibliopolis, 1992), pp. 497-593
  Curley reexamines Hobbes’ reaction to the publication of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, taking up the question of Hobbes’ own religious views and the sincerity of his professions of the Christian faith.

• 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

• 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