Leviathan

Written in the blood and chaos of the English Civil War, Leviathan attempts an impossible task: proving that civilization itself is a deliberate act of will. Thomas Hobbes strips human nature down to its brutal components - fear, desire, the relentless drive for self-preservation - and arrives at a conclusion that shocked his contemporaries and still provces today. In the absence of authority, life truly is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The only alternative to endless conflict is the social contract: individuals surrendering their freedom to a sovereign power capable of enforcing peace. Hobbes calls this entity the Leviathan, a metaphorical sea monster, because only something vast and terrible can contain the even greater terrors of human violence. The book was burned upon publication, condemned as seditious, yet it inaugurated the modern study of political philosophy. Its questions persist: What do we owe the state? What does the state owe us? Where does legitimate authority end and tyranny begin? Hobbes offers no comfortable answers. He offers instead a mirror.