Leviathan
Leviathan is Thomas Hobbes's foundational work of political philosophy, written during the upheaval of the English Civil War and published in 1651. Hobbes builds his argument from the ground up, beginning with human sense, imagination, speech, and reason before turning to the passions that drive people. He describes a "state of nature" in which life, absent a common power, is a war of all against all. To escape it, individuals collectively surrender their rights to a sovereign authority—the great "Leviathan"—through a social contract that grants near-absolute power in exchange for peace and security.
The book ranges across psychology, language, religion, and the interpretation of Scripture, all marshaled to justify a unified civil power. It matters because it inaugurated modern political theory: the ideas of the social contract, the artificial commonwealth, and sovereignty grounded in human agreement rather than divine right. Provocative and rigorously argued, Leviathan still shapes debates about liberty, authority, and the legitimacy of the state.
How it begins
The original has very extensive margin notes, which are used to show where he introduces the definitions of words and concepts, to give in short the subject that a paragraph or section is dealing with, and to give references to his quotations, largely but not exclusively biblical. To some degree, these margin notes seem to have been intended to serve in place of an index, the original having none. They are all in italics. He also used italics for words in other languages than English, and there are a number of Greek words, in the Greek alphabet, in the text. To deal with these within the limits of plain vanilla ASCII, I have done the following in this E-text. I have restricted my use of full capitalization to those places where Hobbes used it, except in the chapter headings, which I have fully capitalized, where Hobbes used a mixture of full capitalization and italics. Where it is clear that the italics are to indicate the text is quoting, I have introduced quotation marks. Within quotation marks I have retained the capitalization that Hobbes used. Where italics seem to be used for emphasis, or for proper names, or just because, I have capitalized the initial letter of the words.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.