Customer Reviews

Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I finished reading Leviathan a couple months ago, but cringed every time I thought about writing a review. The book is large at over 700 pages and covers so much ground, a review would have to be a book in itself to do it justice. Due to Leviathan's philosophical content and somewhat antiquated language, it's very slow going. Each page needs time to digest.

So I'm not going to bother writing a real review. I will just say that Leviathan is a 5-star classic and worth your time, if you can deal with reading political philosophy. Hobbes divides the work into four major sections:

Of Man, in which he discusses human nature and why civilized people prefer peace to war. Here Hobbes establishes the primary reason that people form a government to rule over them: to safeguard them from enemies, both external and internal.

Of Common-wealth, in which Hobbes first talks about the several forms of government and the pros and cons of each. He then explains the rights that a government has over its people; according to Hobbes, the government can do pretty much anything it wants to. Finally he goes into the things that tend to weaken or dissolve a government.

Of a Christian Common-wealth, the longest section, in which Hobbes accepts the Bible as the word of God and quotes from it numerous time to bolster his position in support of a powerful government.

Of the Kingdome of Darknesse, the shortest and strangest section, in which Hobbes veers away from the topic of government and instead focuses on religious practices and beliefs of the day that he deems improper and inconsistent with the Bible.

It took me months to read this, but I came away with great respect for Hobbes and a better understanding of politics. I can't say that I agree with everything I read, but I think the majority of his arguments are sound and convincing.

Five stars, no doubt in my mind. But it's a dive into the deep end, so you'll probably only finish it if you really appreciate and enjoy philosophical discussion!

Hobbes' sole claim to fame these days is the out-of-context quotation from him that life is "nasty, brutish, and short." The full quotation from chapter 13, section 9 which inveighs against the state of war, in concluding the statement on man's condition in such a state, is "and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."-Beats me why "solitary" and "poor" are left out of the popular quotation-The point is, this is the condition Hobbes wanted to AVOID, not to justify! He had just lived through the bloodfest known as the English Civil War in which many of his friends were horribly slaughtered because of their religious beliefs. His whole point in writing this book was to advance arguments that one should not go to war over differences in religion. His controversial alternative is absolute obedience to the state and secular authorities. This alternative combined with the quote, noted above, so maddeningly and frequently taken out of context, have given Hobbes and his work the undeserved reputation as, well, curmudgeonly. One might ask what sort of book you might write if you had just witnessed the horrific slaughter and loss of esteemed friends that Hobbes had. You would probably write a book urging peace at any price even if it meant undue subjugation to the state at times. This is exactly what Hobbes did.-Hobbes belongs to that majestic, good-natured and unflappable tradition of brilliant English heretical political and religious writers including, among others, David Hume (well, Scottish too) and Bertrand Russell who seemed merely humored by the ecclesiastics calling down hell-fire upon them and similar dire threats from men in power. Scholars are STILL trying to debunk the work of these prominent men, among others more obscure, with little success it must be said.- Yes, the prose can be rough-going at times. But if you want an argument against war, specifically war over religion. This is the masterpiece to set your nose to. Once you've finished, it's hard not to smile when you think of Hobbes and his essential decency amidst the turbulent times in which he lived.

Like most books, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan is divided into chapters. But it is also divided into four "Parts." The Prometheus edition (not to be confused with the Penguin edition) includes only the first two parts, though they sell it as if it were the entire book instead of only the first half. Any other edition would be better than this.

If you want a good edition, you could go with the Hackett edition, edited by Edwin Curley, modernized and with the important variants (translated into English, of course) from the Latin edition of the Leviathan published during Hobbes' lifetime. A good edition that is not modernized is the Cambridge edition edited by Richard Tuck. (Having an editor does NOT necessarily mean that the text has been reduced; they often serve to rid the text of previous publishing typographical errors.) Which of these you should get will depend upon two things: Whether you are interested in the variants from the Latin edition, and whether you are comfortable reading something written in the 1600's. For most people, probably the modernized Hackett edition would be best, as many people have difficulty with 17th century English. But if you want Hobbes' exact words, I recommend the Cambridge edition. Whenever buying classic texts, which edition you buy can be extremely important, as the dreadful Prometheus edition demonstrates.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote "Leviathan" in 1651, it was his most important philosophical work. I think you should know something of Hobbes to understand how his thinking was influenced by his experiences. He was born 2 months prematurely on the day the Spanish Armada approaches the English coast. His mother's fear of invasion caused the premature birth. Hobbes remarked late in life, "his mother brought forth twins-myself and fear." Fear seems to be Hobbes life long companion and the key passion in his political system, which uses human passions as its foundation. He was a child prodigy reading Latin and Greek at the age of six years old. At fifteen, he entered Oxford University and hated his educational experience there. He thought the curriculum was too immersed in the ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle. He called them "erroneous doctrines," and throughout his life he railed against English universities for there stodgy curriculum.

At the age of 22, he graduates and takes a job to tutor the son of the Earl of Devonshire. It gives him the opportunity to travel throughout Europe where he meets with Galileo in Florence and Descartes in Paris. Descartes calls Hobbes the greatest political philosopher of his day. During the British civil war, Hobbes flees to Paris because he is a well-known monarchist sympathizer. In 1651, he publishes his monumental work "Leviathan." He returns to England, submits to Cromwell's government, and withdraws from politics. He is on friendly terms with Charles II when the Stuart's are restored to the throne.

Hobbes philosophy is "materialistic"; he is greatly influenced by Galileo's mechanistic approach to science, and Euclidian geometry. His ambition was to explain all phenomena, man, and government with mathematical precision. In "Leviathan," he explains human conduct is a product of human passions. The most dominant passions are fear of violent death and desire for power, both are manifestations of man's most basic impulse, "self preservation." Hobbes asserts that the basic impulse is the right of the individual; he calls it a "natural right." All men process this natural right equally. This theory leads Hobbes to believe man's natural state to be one of constant conflict with each other. This leads him to write the following quote he is most known for: "men's lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." So as not to have to live in constant state of fear or conflict, men make a contract for protection with the state. Hobbes believes that the best state is one led by a single sovereign whose power must be unrestricted with all three branches of government devolving to him. A single sovereign who has absolute power and cannot be replaced by the people.

His political writing had immediate influence in the world and influences other philosophers like Spinoza, Hutcheson, Locke, and Hume. Hobbes is the first man to write about political philosophy in such methodical terms. He is an excellent writer and his theories are easy to understand by the laymen. As a graduate student of political philosophy, I recommend if you have an interest in politics, philosophy, or government then you must start with reading Hobbes "Leviathan."

Leviathan is one of the first books written after philosophy begun to detach itself from the Catholic inspired medieval thinking, also marking the beginning of the influence philosophy received from the scientific thinking, a point not suficiently y explored by Thomas Hobbes but which one we can get with the benefit of hindsight.

Leviathan is an old Fenician word for a mythical crocodile, quoted in some verses of the biblical Book of Job, an taken by Thomas Hobbes as meaning the representation of a powerfull governor totally devoted to do his most to the benefit of the Commonwealth. In Hobbes mind the most efficient form of government was monarchy, but he takes a lot of time to analyse also Democracy and Aristocracy. One has to keep in mind that the time the book was written was one of internal revolt, a civil intestine strife in England, and the objective of Hobbes was to lay the foundations for human actions conducive to an equilibrium within the state, ending war.

His book can be also be taken as one where many important aspects of Right and Laws are aprehended, from the perspective of a deeply religious anglican man, that tried his best to separate, in his words, the Kingdoms of men (where civil laws are imperative) from the Kingdom of God (Naturall Right). He does extensive analysis of God's Laws and its importance to the balance in the relationship between men.

The edition is a very good one, with a good introduction and is a copy of the text as written in the 17th century, exhibiting an archaic English sometimes difficult to understand. Also, some quotations in Greek and in Latin are not translated, despite all the effort the author makes to turn them inteligible to the reader.

The book could be understood as antipodal to Machiavellian's The Prince, because power is not taken here as something good in itself, but only as a means of carrying the security and hapinnes the kingdom subjects deserve.

While I enjoyed the text itself very much, I cannot recommend this particular copy of it. I read parts of it for a class, and wanted to read more on my own, but I simply could not make it through 736 small pages of miniscule print without getting frustrated (as well as getting a headache). Further, the margins are practically nonexistent, making it a poor copy to buy for anyone who likes to take notes in the book. Additionally, the binding is quite weak.

I would encourage any interested parties to continue pursuing the 'Leviathan,' as it is a very rich text indeed, but I would recommend finding a different copy.

To understand Hobbes' LEVIATHAN, the reader must first focus on 'fear.' His contemporaries were terrified of chaos and anarchy and would move heaven and earth to preserve the continuity of the state. Nowhere does he mention the word 'fear' but his real, if underlying purpose becomes clear enough as the reader plows through his dense tract that has as its purported goal to explain the origin of political institutions and to define their powers and proper limits. Hobbes sets up this thesis by first insisting that all of men's ideas originate from sense impressions, which take their cue from the external universe infringing on these sense organs. This emphasis on sense impression led Hobbes next to consider how the external universe manages this neat trick. Motion, according to Hobbes, is the key. Motion naturally leads man, for good or ill, to impact on other men. This impacting may be beneficial, as in man agreeing to help one another respect their respective rights, or it may be harmful, as in man being in a state or war. It was this fear that humanity might start to question the wisdom of the ruling nobility that caused Hobbes to write the longest defense of the royal right of kings ever written. Hobbes cleverly compared man to a wind-up clock: 'That great Leviathan is but an artificial man with an artificial soul.' As the reader follows this geometric logic, he is pressured to accept Hobbes' true premise: that it is better for the common man to put up with the occasional despot than to risk what he terms the horror of 'that condition which is called Warre, and such a warre as is of every man, against every man.'
Even if that regime becomes so thuggish that its citizens wish to break it, Hobbes says 'No way.' If these citizens do break this covenant, then Hobbes warns that their lives will be 'solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.' Clearly Hobbes was a man of his times, one who was a paid shill of the crowned heads of Europe. Such a man today we would label as a fearful toady who desperately needs to maintain his own precarious hold on power. So why is LEVIATHAN still read today? Perhaps Hobbes points out the road that humanity might have once chosen to travel. We, like Robert Frost, have thankfully chosen the other less travelled by.

Tommy Hobbes was Francis Bacon's favorite secretary, and it shows in the math-like precision with which he attempts to build a model of human political interaction -- one that justifies the need for a strong state to hold human "appetites" in check. Hobbes' argument reads like a geometrical proof, which goes something like:

We take it as a given that people, like Galilean celestial bodies, are in perpetual motion, moved by appetites for power. The power of a person is his or her present means to obtain some future good. Every person's power resists and hinders the effects of other people's power. Thus, if all people are created equal in a hypothetical state of nature, then:

1. From equality proceeds mutual fear.
2. From mutual fear proceeds warfare.
3. In such warfare, nothing is unjust.
4. But reason suggests a better way to self-preservation (to peace): the right and laws of nature.
5. The right of nature is the liberty we have to use our power for self-preservation.
6. The 1st law of nature is that we ought to strive for peace, but when we cannot obtain it then it's war.
7. The 2nd law of nature is that in the interests of peace we will lay down our natural right to give us as much liberty as we would allow others to have against us (the golden rule).
8. This mutual laying down of our natural right is a social contract.
9. There must be a coercive power (the commonwealth) to enforce this contract.
10. The commonwealth is ruled by a sovereign who embodies the will of the people and is granted certain inalienable rights to enforce the social contract.

In short, those who fear authority (anarchists, libertarians, etc.) will revile Hobbes, because of power's potential for abuse, but Hobbes would argue that a true Leviathan could never abuse its subjects because it is actually made up of those same subjects (in other words, a roundabout defense of liberal democracy).

While most readers pay a great deal of attention to Hobbes' political theory in this work, they fail to realize that the early half contains some of the most ground breaking and revolutionizing treatment of philosophy ever written. In a philosophical atmosphere dominated by Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, Hobbes' emphasis on the way we use language, rather than "clear and distinct ideas" is simply mind blowing. Hobbes, like Descartes, was interested in laying some "extra-scientific" foundation for the new sciences of Newton and Gallileo. Whereas Descartes seems to have found such a foundation in his relation to God, Hobbes saw it in language. In this sense, it anticipated "The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language" by 4 long centuries. Hobbes' fascinating account of what constitutes "truth" and answers to traditional philosophical problems that apply his theories on language are astounding. While Hobbes' political theory is wrought with the very ambiguities he sought to destroy in philosophical and scientific discourse (e.g. what concretely constitutes the "leviathan" and the "soveriegn"), the ties between language and political theory stayed unexamined for a number of decades, if not centuries. Hobbes' highly original and innovative thought are an inspiration to us all.

Leviathan is a the most exiting work of political philosophy I have ever read. You may disagree with it, but you should read it anyway and recognize its significance in the history of ideas.

This edition is a good one. Its pages are thin enough for ink to bleed through, but the text itself is definitive and its printing is based on editions from Hobbes' lifetime. Contrary to a prior reader review, this edition DOES have parts three and four, although rarely do those sections get read anymore (the interesting things are in one and two).