Abstract

The moral doctrine of Hobbes, in many ways the most interesting of our major British philosophers, is, I think, commonly seen in a false perspective which has seriously obscured its real affinities. This is, no doubt, largely due to the fact that most modern readers begin and end their study of Hobbes's ethics with the Leviathan, a rhetorical and, in many ways, a popular Streitschrift published in the very culmination of what looked at the time to be a permanent revolution, and do not pay such attention to the more calmly argued statements of the same doctrine contained in the Elements of Law, circulated before the outbreak of the Civil War, or the De Cive.