Leviathan

Written amid the chaos of the English Civil War, Hobbes’s masterwork argues that without a strong central authority human life descends into a ‘war of all against all,’ famously making existence ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ To escape this state of nature, people surrender their freedom to an absolute sovereign—the Leviathan—in exchange for peace and security. Rigorous, provocative, and grimly logical, it laid the foundations of modern political philosophy and the theory of the social contract. Still fiercely debated today, Leviathan is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand power, the state, and why we obey.