Thomas Hobbes: Elements of Law

Hobbes’s Elements of Law was written in 1640, on the eve of the English Civil War. It circulated in manuscript, and eleven manuscripts now survive. Two of them contain a substantial amount of material in Hobbes’s own handwriting. Soon after writing it, Hobbes fled to France, while in England civil war broke out over many of the issues discussed by Hobbes in this book. In France he wrote a Latin version of his political theory (De Cive, on the Citizen), and then the English Leviathan, of which a Latin revision followed and in which he greatly expanded what he had to say about religion and church-state relations. The Elements of Law presents a complete but succinct version of Hobbes’s political theory and of his more general philosophy. It analyzes the nature of knowledge and science, discusses psychology and human nature, surveys the rights and duties of individuals, and argues for the need of states to be governed by sovereign authority. It discusses the relationship between politics and religion, and the extent and limitations of political power. It is ’a work of extraordinary assurance, an almost fully fledged statement of Hobbes’s entire political philosophy’. (Noel Malcolm)

This edition is intended to replace the one edited by Ferdinand Tönnies (1889), from which that of J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford World’s Classics, 1994) derives. It establishes a more accurate text based on all the eleven known manuscripts, and includes much material omitted by Tönnies (who knew of only six manuscripts). It draws extensively on modern scholarship on Hobbes and his contexts.

Johann P. Sommerville, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Johann P. Sommerville is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He graduated BA (1976), MA (1980), and PhD (1981) from Cambridge University, where he was a fellow of St John’s College. He was Joseph Hodges Choate Memorial Fellow at Harvard (1976-7), National Endowment for the Humanities long-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC (1993), R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (1998-9), and the Renaissance Society of America’s Discipline Representative in Legal and Political Thought (2015-18).