Leviathan

⚖The case for it

Hobbes starts from a body: appetite, aversion, fear, and out of those alone he builds a commonwealth. Every step is laid out where you can check it, so you can find the place it fails. Long stretches near the end are dead weight for most readers, and skipping them costs you nothing of the spine. What holds is a question the news keeps returning to: what people will surrender when they are frightened, and who ends up holding it. Locke and Rousseau are both answering him, and neither has settled it.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Half of Leviathan is biblical exegesis almost nobody reads; Parts III and IV argue with seventeenth-century churchmen for three hundred pages. The famous material arrives via chains of definitions that read like geometry, and the argument lands on absolute sovereignty, a conclusion most readers spend the book resisting. You come for one sentence about the state of nature; Hobbes makes you earn it.

— the honest librarian