Based on the original 1651 text, this edition incorporates Hobbes’s own corrections, while also retaining the original spelling and punctuation, to read with vividness and clarity. C. B. Macpherson’s introduction elucidates one of the most fascinating works of modern philosophy for the general reader.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was born in Malmesbury. Entering Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1603, he took his degree in 1608 and became tutor to the eldest son of Lord Cavendish of Hardwick, afterwards the Earl of Devonshire; his connection with this family was life-long. His first interest was in the classics, and his first published work a translation of Thucydides, in 1628. An interest in science and philosophy soon developed, heightened by extended travels in Europe in 1629-31 and 1634-37. This led to his great project of a political science. His first verson of this, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, was privately circulated in 1640, when Parliament was hotly disputing the king’s powers, and Hobbes fled to Paris, where he stayed for eleven years.

A second version, De Cive, was published in 1642, and the third, Leviathan—the crowning achievement of his political science—in 1651. It was so influential that it came under widespread attack and was in danger of condemnation by the House of Commons. Hobbes perforce lived quietly and published little more on political matters. At the age of eighty-four he composed an autobiography in Latin verse, and within the next three years translated the whole of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.