• Covers important topics such as atheism, and human nature
• Hobbes was the first great English political philosopher
• Richard Tuck is an expert in political philosophy and history
• Discusses Hobbes' view of the natural human condition as 'nasty, brutish, and short'
• Fully updated bibliography for this edition

Thomas Hobbes, the first great English political philosopher, has long had the reputation of being a pessimistic atheist, who saw human nature as inevitably evil and proposed a totalitarian state to subdue human failings. In this illuminating study, Richard Tuck re-evaluates Hobbes's philosophy and dispels these myths, revealing him to have been passionately concerned with the refutation of scepticism, and to have developed a theory of knowledge which rivalled that of Descartes in its importance.