• A classic text for everyone interested in political thought, offering seminal arguments concerning the legitimacy and proper exercise of state power, the role of political consent, and the nature of sovereignty
• A definitive text based on twenty years of scholarly work by Noel Malcolm, correcting many previous errors
• Includes details of the changes made by Hobbes when he translated his work into Latin some years after its original publication
• Contains a detailed introduction and extensive notes with contextual and linguistic information and details of textual changes

   
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is not just one of the greatest philosophical texts in the English language; it is one of the most important works in the history of Western political thought. Almost every major tradition in the centuries after Hobbes—from radical democracy to authoritarianism—has been influenced by its arguments. Written in exile during a period of dramatic developments—civil war and regicide—Leviathan is in some ways the product of its own special circumstances. And yet, at the same time, it deals with fundamental issues that matter to all of us today: the nature and purpose of the state, the relation between human nature and politics, the idea of natural rights, the justification of authority, the concept of representation, the nature of sovereignty, the limits of obedience, and the relationship between religious obligations and human ones.
  
This new edition offers a definitive text drawn from more than twenty years of research by Noel Malcolm, including, in English translation, all the most significant revisions made in Hobbes's later Latin translation of Leviathan, as well as extensive explanatory notes that elucidate Hobbes's language and identify for readers the people and places of the Leviathan's seventeenth-century world.