Leviathan ranks as a classic western work on statecraft comparable to Machiavelli's The Prince.
The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is widely regarded as one of a handful of truly influential political philosophers, whose masterwork Leviathan rivals in significance the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.
Hobbes is famous for his development of what has come to be known as "social contract theory", the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreements that would be made among rational, free, and equal persons.
He is equally infamous for having used social contract theory to arrive at the conclusion that society must knowingly submit to the absolute authority of a sovereign given that our animal natures would surely produce a brutish, nasty, perpetual state of war throughout the world.
THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679) was an English philosopher whose vision of the world was strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern was the problem of social and political order: how human beings could live together in peace and avoid the danger of civil conflict and universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.
