[Most recently updated: March 27, 2021]
LEVIATHAN
By Thomas Hobbes
1651
LEVIATHAN OR THE MATTER, FORME, & POWER OF A COMMON-WEALTH ECCLESIASTICAL AND CIVILL
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Printed for Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1651.
This E-text was prepared from the Pelican Classics edition of Leviathan, which in turn was prepared from the first edition. I have tried to follow as closely as possible the original, and to give the flavour of the text that Hobbes himself proof-read, but the following differences were unavoidable.
Hobbes used capitals and italics very extensively, for emphasis, for proper names, for quotations, and sometimes, it seems, just because.
The original has very extensive margin notes, which are used to show where he introduces the definitions of words and concepts, to give in short the subject that a paragraph or section is dealing with, and to give references to his quotations, largely but not exclusively biblical. To some degree, these margin notes seem to have been intended to serve in place of an index, the original having none. They are all in italics.
He also used italics for words in other languages than English, and there are a number of Greek words, in the Greek alphabet, in the text.
To deal with these within the limits of plain vanilla ASCII, I have done the following in this E-text.
I have restricted my use of full capitalization to those places where Hobbes used it, except in the chapter headings, which I have fully capitalized, where Hobbes used a mixture of full capitalization and italics.