Leviathan

Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, is Thomas Hobbes's 1651 treatise of social and political theory, written during the English Civil War and revised in a Latin edition in 1668. It is one of the earliest and most influential statements of social contract theory: Hobbes argues that without a strong, undivided sovereign authority, human life in the state of nature collapses into a war of all against all, leaving life nasty, brutish and short. The only way to escape this condition, on Hobbes's account, is for individuals to contract together to submit to an absolute sovereign whose authority cannot legitimately be divided or overthrown once granted. The book takes its title from the sea monster Leviathan named in the Book of Job, a deliberately provocative choice next to the plainly descriptive titles other political works of the period used, such as Locke's later Two Treatises of Government.