The symbol of the Leviathan came to the forefront in political theory, as the structure and the ideological justification of the state underwent radical change in at least three European countries from the early 1920s to the 1940s. Thus, the terrifying image of Leviathan has sometimes given rise to a surprising historiography of twentieth-century totalitarian states, tracing them back to the origins of modern political thought, as if there were a direct line of descent from Hobbes to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, or, worse still, as if Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) were an exact anticipation of twentieth-century political catastrophes. The differing interpretations of Hobbes proposed by Strauss, Tonnies, Schmitt, Vialatoux, Capitant, Pareto, Collingwood, and Oakeshott, are here interpreted in the perspective of the interwar transformation of Europe. The contributors, who are German, British and French political philosophers, analyse the conditions which have made possible conflicting readings of Hobbes's political philosophy, and explain why they sometimes don't do justice to Leviathan.

Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau bring together original essays by the world's leading Hobbes scholars to discuss Hobbes's masterpiece after three and a half centuries. The contributors address three different themes. The first is the place of Leviathan within Hobbes's output as a political philosopher. What does Leviathan add to The Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642; 1647)? What is the relation between the English Leviathan and the Latin version of the book (1668)? Does Leviathan deserve its pre-eminence? The second theme concerns the connections between Hobbes's psychology and Hobbes's politics. The essays discuss Hobbes's curious views on the significance of laughter, evidence that he connected life in the state with passionlessness; the ways in which such things as fear for one's life entitle subjects to rebel; and the question of how the sovereign's personal passions are to be squared with his personifying a multitude. The third theme is Hobbes's views on the Bible and the Church: contributors examine the tensions between any allowance for ecclesiastical and (differently) biblical authority on the one hand, and political authority on the other. This is a book which anyone working on Hobbes or on this period of intellectual history will want to read.