Leviathan, Or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill.

"For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it": First Edition, First Issue of Thomas Hobbes's Landmark Work Leviathan

Leviathan, Or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill.

HOBBES, Thomas.

Item Number: 145080

London: Andrew Crooke, 1651.

First edition, first issue, with “head” ornament (rather than “bear”) on letterpress title page, additional engraved title supplied in facsimile, and folding table. Wing 2246. Pforzheimer 491. Macdonald & Hargreaves 42. Folio, bound in full polished calf with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within gilt bands, red morocco spine label lettered in gilt, gilt ruling and fleuron cornerpieces to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins. In near fine condition with some of the usual browning to the page edges. A very nice example of this highspot.

Leviathan ranks as a classic western work on statecraft comparable to Machiavelli's The Prince. Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), Leviathan argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. "This book produced a fermentation in English thought not surpassed until the advent of Darwinism. Its importance may be gauged by the long list of assailants it aroused. It was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum 7 May 1703, though all Hobbes’s works had previously been condemned in toto, and it still remains a model of vigorous exposition, unsurpassed in the language" (Pforzheimer). "Hobbes had a fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature [which] had a powerful influence on the framers of the [American] Constitution. During the early years of the Revolutionary period, American leaders found Locke’s revolutionary compact ideas more useful than Hobbes’ view of the unlimited authority of the state. But as the political and social experience of the 1780s seemed to bear out Hobbes’s pessimistic view that men are essentially self-interested, the Hobbesian outlook became more relevant. When John Adams wrote that ‘he who would found a state, and make proper laws for the government of it, must presume that all men are bad by nature,’ he was expressing an idea that was derived at once from Hobbes" (Lutz & Warden, A Covenanted People, 38).

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