When Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) first published his Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill in 1651, it was immediately controversial. Published at the end of the English Civil Wars, his ties with the royalists, with whom he was in exile in Paris, were severed and he fled to England under Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In 1666, after the 1660 Restoration of Charles II, Parliament passed a bill that resulted in his being banned from writing anything on human affairs. Yet Sir Robert Filmer, ardent defender of the divine right of kings, writes that he likes the result of Hobbes’s philosophy although not its foundations and Charles granted him a pension.

            The controversy has hardly ever abated. Immanuel Kant found Hobbes’s views terrifying, Leo Strauss argued that he is the founder of liberalism, and Arnold A. Rogow called him a radical in service of reaction.

            All or most of this controversy stems from Hobbes’s political philosophy. However, as we will see, Leviathan is about much more than that. Indeed, it is hard to think of another single book in Anglophone philosophy that takes up so many topics—metaphysics, theology, logic, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, rhetoric, physics, historiography, and economics as a start, in addition to politics—let alone with such stylistic beauty and systematic clarity. In this course, we will attempt to read this book with the care it deserves.