HOBBES, Thomas (1588-1679). Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. London: Andrew Crooke, 1651.
HOBBES, Thomas (1588-1679). Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. London: Andrew Crooke, 1651.

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HOBBES, Thomas (1588-1679). Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. London: Andrew Crooke, 1651.

2° (274 x 180mm). Engraved frontispiece, folding letterpress table, additional engraved author portrait by Faithorne inserted before title-page. (Frontispiece with minor repair at fore-edge, some browning, occasional light spotting, minor wormtrack at gutter of two quires.) Modern binding of old vellum. Provenance: Andrew Philipps, Feb. 14 1694 (inscription on frontispiece) -- a few small modern annotations.

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE of the most important 17th-century English work of political philosophy. Written in the midst of the English Civil War, Leviathan sets out Hobbes's firm belief in the State as an aggregation of individual men submitting voluntarily for the good of the greater commonwealth in order to lift humankind out of anarchy. True to Hobbes's prediction, the originality and directness of his work exacerbated the divisions in a nation already torn, but it also brought many out of the 'darkness of ignorance'. Leviathan directly influenced theorists from Spinoza to Bentham. Macdonald & Hargreaves 42; Norman 1082; PMM 138; Wing H-2246.

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