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Noel Malcolm presents his long-awaited critical edition of a work that represents one of the great intellectual achievements of the modern age. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, published in 1651, is a foundational text of modern political theory, based upon a broad theory of human nature, including highly original views of mind, language, and religion.
List of contents
- Volume 1: Editorial Introduction
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- A Note on Fates and References
- General Introduction
- 1: The Writing of Leviathan
- 2: Some Features of the English Leviathan
- 3: From the English Leviathan to the Latin
- Textual Introduction
- 1: The English Leviathan
- 2: The Latin Leviathan
- 3: The Present Edition
- 4: A Bibliographical Description of the Editions used in the Present Edition
- List of Manuscripts
- Bibliography
- Index
- Volume 2: The English and Latin Texts
- Abbreviations and Conventions used in this Edition
- Leviathan
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Volume 3: The English and Latin Texts
- Part 3
- Part 4
- A Review and Conclusion
- Appendix
- Index to the Latin Leviathan
- Index of Biblical Citations
- General Index
About the author
Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and General Editor of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. He has been a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Foreign Editor of The Spectator, and political columnist of the Daily Telegraph. He left journalism in 1995 in order to concentrate on scholarly research and writing. His books include short histories of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the Clarendon Edition of the correspondence of Thomas Hobbes. Since 1995 he has been a Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, and Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.
Summary
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is one of the most important philosophical texts in the English language, and one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written. This is the first critical edition based on a full study of the manuscript and printing history. It is also the first edition to place the English text side by side with Hobbes's later Latin version of it, complete with a set of notes in which the many passages that differ in the Latin are translated into English. So, for the first time, readers of Leviathan will be able to see clearly every stage of the development of the text. Both texts are fully annotated with explanatory notes. The editor's Introduction, which takes up the whole of the first volume, gives a path-breaking account of the work's context, sources, and textual history. This definitive edition will set the study of Hobbes's masterwork on a new basis.
This three volume paperback set is also available in component parts: The Editorial Introduction (Volume 1), ISBN 978-0-19-870909-1, and The English and Latin Texts (Volumes 2 and 3), ISBN 978-0-19-872396-7. The hardback three-volume set is also available, ISBN 978-0-19-960262-9
Additional text
This is a scrupulous edition, but the dominant impression is of its generosity, for Dr Malcolm seems to have thought of everything which the reader could need in order to understand this rich text.
