Leviathan Author:Thomas Hobbes Edited by C.B. MacPherson From the Turmoil of the English Civil War, when life was truly 'nasty, brutish, and short'. Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) speaks directly to the twentieth century. In its over-riding concern for peace, its systematic analysis of power and its elevation of politics to the status of a science, it mirrors much modern thinking. And despite its contemp... more »orary notoriety - Pepys called it 'a book the Bishops will not let be printed again' - it was also, as Dr MacPherson shows, a convincing apologia for the emergent seventeenth-century market society.
Penguin Classics
We all know by name the books which have changed history. They lie in almost every library, as monumental as the Pyramids or the Great WAll of China, and as seldom visited. In fact many of these great works can be read with profit today by any intelligent reader. The books may be old but their arguments often find an echo in modern thinking.
The Pelican Classics will present some of the most influential books in philosophy, religion, science, history, politics, and economics in new editions for a modern audience, and each work will be prefaced by a critical introduction assessing its significance for its comtemporaries, its effect on succeeding generations, and its relevance today.
The cover is based on a detail from the engraved title page of the first edition of Leviathan in the British Museum, London.« less