Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes wrote that in the state of nature, human life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But his own life spanned ninety-one extraordinary years, spanning the English Civil War and the birth of modern political thought. Leslie Stephen, the eminent Victorian intellectual and father of Virginia Woolf, brings his formidable analytical powers to bear on one of philosophy's most dangerous thinkers. This is not a dry academic treatise but a vivid intellectual portrait: Stephen traces how Hobbes built his case for absolute sovereignty from observations of human nature, how the terrifying frontispiece of Leviathan, a giant composed of tiny human figures, holding both sword and crozier, visualizes his vision of the state as a mortal god, a governing machine. For readers seeking to understand the philosophical foundations of modern governance, and the eternal tension between liberty and security, Stephen's essay remains essential reading.