Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill.

£6,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The second edition of this true classic in the history of political philosophy in which Hobbes famously argued that a rigid social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign is always preferable to the brutal anarchy of “the state of nature”. Hobbes’s conception of the State as an aggregate of individual’s in society who agree to hand over power to a central authority whose job it is to impose law and order is brilliantly epitomised by the books iconic engraved allegorical frontispiece, perhaps the most famous graphic representation of a political theory of all time. Hobbes also articulated a specifically materialist philosophy of mind that stood in stark contrast to the separation of mind and body advocated by his contemporary René Descartes, instead emphasising the machine-like quality of the natural world, even discussing the possible creation of artificial life. There are three editions of Leviathan each dated 1651 but distinguishable by the various the various printer’s woodcut devices to the title-pages (‘Head’, ‘Bear’ and ‘Ornaments’). The present example is the second edition with the woodcut device of Bear crouching amid a spray of foliate to the title-page and the name of the publisher Andrew Crooke misspelt ‘Ckooke’. This edition also has an erratic pagination with numerous printing errors to the page numbers, but the text is continuous and complete. It is thought to have been published outside of England, likely in Holland by Christoffel Conradus some time before

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