Hobbes Publishes Leviathan

1651

Thomas Hobbes, a seventy-three-year-old royalist in exile in Paris, published an imposing folio arguing that humans in the state of nature lived lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and that only an absolute sovereign could secure peace. Political philosophy in English had found its first great masterwork, and the debate between liberty and security its most provocative framing.