Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan ─ Introduction / the English and Latin Test (I) / the English and Latin Texts (Ii)

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is one of the most important philosophical texts in the English language, and one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written. This is the first critical edition based on a full study of the manuscript and printing history. It is also the first edition to place the English text side by side with Hobbes's later Latin version of it, complete with a set of notes in which the many passages that differ in the Latin are translated into English. So, for the first time, readers of Leviathan will be able to see clearly every stage of the development of the text. Both texts are fully annotated with explanatory notes. The editor's Introduction, which takes up the whole of the first volume, gives a path-breaking account of the work's context, sources, and textual history. This definitive edition will set the study of Hobbes's masterwork on a new basis.

Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and General Editor of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. He has been a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Foreign Editor ofThe Spectator, and political columnist of the Daily Telegraph. He left journalism in 1995 in order to concentrate on scholarly research and writing. His books include short histories of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the Clarendon Edition of the correspondence of Thomas Hobbes. Since 1995 he has been a Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, and Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.