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If there were no government or powerful ruler thought Thomas Hobbs, there would be a war of all against all,

and life in his words would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

That's why we should consent to be ruled by an absolute sovereign.

Hobbes' most famous book, The Leviathan, was written in the 17th century during a period of turmoil, with England at war with itself.

But given that Hobbes had already expressed many of the ideas in the Leviathan in previous works, why did he write it?

Noel Malcolm has been engrossed in Hobbesian scholarship for many years.

Noel Malcolm, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you.

The topic we're going to focus on is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in context.

Now you've just completed a definitive edition of Leviathan with the Latin

translation as well that Hobbs made. Could you just begin by saying something

about how Hobbs came to write Leviathan?

Well, that's quite a big question and it's one of the ones that I've worked on rather

intensively because I think we never had an absolutely convincing account of that before.

The problem was that by the time Hobbs wrote Leviathan and he was writing it in the late 1640s. He's already written two full-length treatises of political

philosophy. The second of those he'd written just a few years earlier, at least he'd done the sort of

public edition for it and done corrections and improvements

to his own satisfaction.

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