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'''''Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil''''', commonly referred to as '''''Leviathan''''', is a book written by [[Thomas Hobbes]] (1588–1679) and published in 1651 (revised [[Latin]] edition 1668).<ref name="Newey"/><ref>Hilary Brown, [https://books.google.com/books?id=aVAMccAgim8C&dq= ''Luise Gottsched the Translator''], Camden House, 2012, p. 54.</ref><ref>It's in this edition that Hobbes coined the expression {{lang|la|auctoritas non veritas facit legem}}, which means "authority, not truth, makes law": book 2, chapter 26, p. [https://books.google.com/books?id=IY8o8On4gJ4C&pg=RA1-PA133&dq=%22Authoritas+non+Veritas+facit+Le+m%22 133].</ref> Its name derives from the biblical [[Leviathan]]. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of [[Social contract|social contract theory]].<ref>{{Cite encyclopedia |title=Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy |encyclopedia=[[Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]] |url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/ |publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University |year=2018 |access-date=11 March 2009 |archive-date=29 March 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200329213632/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/ |url-status=live }} (Retrieved 11 March 2009)</ref> Written during the [[English Civil War]] (1642–1651), it argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute [[Sovereignty|sovereign]]. Hobbes wrote that civil war and the brute situation of a [[state of nature]] ("[[bellum omnium contra omnes|the war of all against all]]") could be avoided only by a strong, undivided government.
==Content==
===Title===
The title of Hobbes's treatise alludes to the [[Leviathan]] mentioned in the [[Book of Job]]. In contrast to the simply informative titles usually given to works of [[early modern]] [[political philosophy]], such as [[John Locke]]'s ''[[Two Treatises of Government]]'' or Hobbes's own earlier work, ''The Elements of Law'', Hobbes selected a poetic name for this more provocative treatise. [[lexicography|Lexicographers]] in the early modern period supposed that the term "[[leviathan]]" was associated with the [[Hebrew]] words {{transl|he|lavah}}, meaning "to couple, connect, or join", and {{transl|he|thannin}}, believed to mean "a serpent or dragon".<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Mintz|first=Samuel|date=1989|title=Leviathan as Metaphor|journal=Hobbes Studies|volume=2|issue=1 |pages=3–9|doi=10.1163/187502589X00023}}</ref> In the [[Westminster Assembly]]'s annotations on the Bible, the interpreters thought that the creature was named using these root words "because by his bignesse he seemes not one single creature, but a coupling of divers together; or because his scales are closed, or straitly compacted together."<ref>{{cite book |last=Downame |first=John |date=1645 |title=Annotations upon all the books of the Old and New Testament wherein the text is explained, doubts resolved, Scriptures parallelled and various readings observed |url=https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A36467.0001.001 |location=London |publisher=John Legatt and John Raworth |page=sig. a3r |author-link=John Downame |access-date=20 February 2019 |archive-date=24 February 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210224152253/https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A36467.0001.001 |url-status=live }}</ref> Samuel Mintz suggests that these connotations lend themselves to Hobbes's understanding of political force since both "Leviathan and Hobbes's sovereign are unities compacted out of separate individuals; they are omnipotent; they cannot be destroyed or divided; they inspire fear in men; they do not make pacts with men; theirs is the dominion of power" on pain of death.<ref>Mintz, p. 5</ref>
===Frontispiece===
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{{quote|Life is but a motion of limbs. For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer?<ref>Hobbes, ''Leviathan'', Introduction.</ref>}}
Hobbes proceeds by defining terms clearly and unsentimentally. Good and evil are nothing more than terms used to denote an individual's appetites and desires, while these appetites and desires are nothing more than the tendency to move toward or away from an object. Hope is nothing more than an appetite for a thing combined with an opinion that it can be had. He suggests that the dominant [[political theology]] of the time, [[Scholasticism]], thrives on confused definitions of everyday words, such as ''incorporeal substance'', which for Hobbes is a contradiction in terms.
Hobbes describes human psychology without any reference to the {{lang|la|[[summum bonum]]}}, or greatest good, as previous thought had done. According to Hobbes, not only is the concept of a {{lang|la|summum bonum}} superfluous, but given the variability of human desires, there could be no such thing. Consequently, any political community that sought to provide the greatest good to its members would find itself driven by competing conceptions of that good with no way to decide among them. The result would be [[civil war]].
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====Taxation====
Hobbes also touched upon the sovereign's ability to tax in ''Leviathan'', although he is not as widely cited for his economic theories as he is for his political theories.<ref>{{Cite journal|author=Aaron Levy |date=October 1954 |title=Economic Views of Thomas Hobbes |journal=[[Journal of the History of Ideas]] |volume=15 |issue=4 |pages=589–595 |doi=10.2307/2707677 |jstor=2707677 }}</ref> Hobbes believed that equal justice includes the equal imposition of taxes. The equality of taxes doesn't depend on equality of wealth, but on the equality of the debt that every man owes to the commonwealth for his defence and the maintenance of the [[rule of law]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/hobbes2.pdf |title=Leviathan: Part II. Commonwealth; Chapters 17–31 |publisher=Early Modern Texts |access-date=13 January 2008 |archive-date=11 July 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200711054219/http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/hobbes2.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref> Hobbes also championed public support for those unable to maintain themselves by labour, which would presumably be funded by taxation. He advocated public encouragement of works of Navigation etc. to usefully employ the poor who could work.
===Part III: Of a Christian Commonwealth===
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Hobbes concludes that the beneficiaries are the churches and churchmen.
== Reception ==
The traditional understanding of the reception of Hobbes' work was that it was almost universally rejected, immediately discredited, not seriously read, and resulted in Hobbes being outed as an atheist. However, this was an image created by Hobbes' main intellectual opponents. It is likely that it merited such furious reaction in some circles precisely because it was being read by many and that it was provoking serious debate on a range of the range of contentious issues that it addressed in its day. One early comment on the text came from [[Brian Duppa]], who wrote that "as in the man, so there are strange mixtures in the book; many things said so well that I could embrace him for it, and many things so wildly and unchristianly, that I could scarce have so much charity for him, as to think he was ever Christian". Another came from [[Alexander Ross (writer)|Alexander Ross]], who wrote "I finde him a man of excellent parts, and in this book much gold, and withal much dross; he hath mingled his wine with too much water, and imbittered his pottage with too much Coloquintida".<ref>{{Citation |last=Parkin |first=Jon |title=The Reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan |date=2007 |work=The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan |pages=441–459 |editor-last=Springborg |editor-first=Patricia |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-hobbess-leviathan/reception-of-hobbess-leviathan/526BE3C09939B4B30B05765835BA188A |access-date=2024-06-06 |series=Cambridge Companions to Philosophy |place=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/ccol0521836670.020 |isbn=978-0-521-83667-8}}</ref>
== Critical analysis ==
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==See also==
* ''[[Behemoth (Hobbes book)|Behemoth]]'' by Thomas Hobbes
* [[Benevolent dictatorship]]▼
* [[Classical republicanism]]
* [[Constitutional monarchy]]▼
* [[Enlightened absolutism]]▼
* [[Hobbes's moral and political philosophy]]
* [[John Locke]]
* {{
* [[Social physics]]
▲* [[Benevolent dictatorship]]
▲* [[Enlightened absolutism]]
▲* [[Constitutional monarchy]]
==References==
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*[https://archive.org/details/leviathan00hobba Scan of 1651 edition]
{{Political philosophy}}
{{Authority control}}
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[[Category:Leviathan]]
[[Category:1651 books]]
[[Category:17th-century
[[Category:Books about sovereignty]]
[[Category:Books by Thomas Hobbes]]
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