At its basis in political theory, Social among the individuals of a political state confers legitimacy on the authority of the state to promulgate, to interpret, and to execute the civil laws to which these individual bind and obligate themselves. Hobbes is generally recognized as the modern father of Social Contract Theory, which was also central to the political and moral theories of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and more recently John Rawls.
This short introduction to the Leviathan will focus on following three core topics of Hobbes’s Social Contract Theory, as presented in the Leviathan: the Contractual Agreement, the State of Nature, and Absolute Sovereignty. John Rawls said in his lectures on Hobbes that, “in own view and that of many others, Hobbes’s Leviathan is the greatest single work of political thought in the English language.” Central to his justification for this acclaim is the extraordinary scope of the Leviathan. Frontispiece engraving of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes by Abraham Bosse, 1650.
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