Leviathan

⚖The case for it

In the state of nature, life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Hobbes' solution: surrender your freedom to an absolute sovereign. Written during the English Civil War in 1651, it became the founding text of social contract theory and modern political philosophy. His materialist psychology (we're all just matter in motion, pursuing desire and fleeing aversion) anticipated cognitive science by 350 years.

— the canon

✕The case against

Half of Leviathan is biblical exegesis almost nobody reads; Parts III and IV argue with seventeenth-century churchmen for three hundred pages. The famous material arrives via chains of definitions that read like geometry, and the argument lands on absolute sovereignty, a conclusion most readers spend the book resisting. You come for one sentence about the state of nature; Hobbes makes you earn it.

— the honest librarian