payment page
Study Tools
Overview
Leviathan was written by English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes and published in 1651
. In it, Hobbes rigorously argues that civil peace and social unity are best achieved by the establishment of a commonwealth through social contract. Hobbes’s ideal commonwealth is ruled by a sovereign power responsible for protecting the security of the commonwealth and granted absolute authority to ensure the common defense.In his introduction, Hobbes describes this commonwealth as an “artificial person” and as a body politic that mimics the human body. The famous frontispiece to the first edition of Leviathan, which Hobbes helped design, portrays the commonwealth as a gigantic human form built out of the bodies of its citizens, the sovereign as its head.
Read the free full text of the work, explanations of important quotes from Leviathan, and a contextual essay about the claims of atheism made against Hobbes.
