Leviathan

⚖The case for it

Chapter 13 is the one everyone quotes, life outside the commonwealth as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and it earns the fame, one reader calling the whole argument “a grim Tinder bio for humanity.” Hobbes builds the politics out of a mechanical account of human motive first, so the sovereign arrives derived rather than asserted, and readers say “you cannot fault his logic” even while rejecting where it lands. The bleakness reads as clarifying: one reviewer credits it with a “demolition of optimistic platitudes” about cooperation. Get through Parts One and Two and Locke and Rousseau become one long argument with this book.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Parts Three and Four are half the page count and almost nobody reads them; one reviewer admits to having “read only the titles of Parts 3 and 4.” The biblical exegesis back there is dated, one reader calling it “nothing new compared to Spinoza.” The syntax itself gets called “dragging a safe uphill,” and an unmodernized-spelling edition makes it worse, which is why edition choice decides who finishes: Curley or Johnston, not a free reprint. Hobbes restates the covenant argument until Part Two starts padding. And the absolute sovereign at the end is a conclusion many readers cannot get past.

— the honest librarian

10h

honest hours

14

sittings