Hobbes: An Essay on Leviathan (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

This Short Essay of 2,000 words seeks to examine the extent to which Leviathan can preserve of destroy liberty. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is essentially a political treatise which examines human behaviour and attempts to turn the state of nature into a liveable condition. Hobbes maintained that the selfish force of man, if not restrained, will result in forms of chaos and destruction, and therefore rational measures of restraint are needed in order to create mechanisms of stability. By developing a theory of human nature, sovereign authority and political obligation, Hobbes sought to prove that the state must be regarded as ultimately both absolute and legitimate in order to prevent the worst of evils, such as civil war, from occurring. Therefore, Hobbes justified the need for a Leviathan in order to control liberty in a constructive manner through the rule of an absolute sovereign. Without such laws man would be in a state of continual fear and danger of violent death, resulting in a life that would be “solitary, poor, nasty brutish, and short!”