I have arrived at the point where I can wholeheartedly (thus unreservedly) agree with prolific and brilliant philosopher Larry May’s statement that Thomas Hobbes is “arguably the greatest systematic philosopher to have written in the English language.” If that be too extravagant for you (e.g., those of you enamored with Hume), consider that Hobbes was “the first great philosopher to write in English.” May himself, by my lights, is our foremost philosopher of international criminal law and justice (he writes in other areas as well, as his works on shared intentionality, collective responsibility, and the morality of groups generally, attests).
More than a few respectable and well-known philosophers have made surprising mistakes and misleading if not simply incorrect interpretations of Hobbes’s ideas, however perhaps plausible and imaginative in construction. The views of these philosophers “ruled the roost” for the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Their portrait of his philosophical corpus long ago moved me to either ignore or dismiss Hobbes as no longer worth my attention, a portrait that happens to have been invoked and reproduced in whole or in part by philosophers and intellectuals who are not scholars of Hobbes by way of caricaturing his ideas such that he is a bête noire or strawman of many moral and political philosophers, political scientists, and their credulous students.
I am neither a Hobbes scholar nor a philosopher, but I’ll confess to having the chutzpah necessary to recommend a list of ten titles (books only) that reflect a rather different—more sophisticated, nuanced, and suggestive—picture of Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy than the one I learned at university (which was, more or less, the ‘traditional’ interpretation, although creatively enhanced by the works of ‘analytical philosophers’ in the mid- to late-twentieth century). A few of the titles below I have not read in toto but learned about them from others, their reference to and use of material from them allowing me to trust their judgment. I am sure I have not listed all the books that might meet the above criteria for inclusion but this is a good start, especially for those of us not specialists in this area but possessed of no less an avid or ardent interest in moral and political philosophy and Liberalism in particular.
- Curran, Eleanor. Reclaiming the Rights of the Hobbesian Subject (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
- Dryzenhaus, David and Thomas Poole, eds. Hobbes and the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- Gert, Bernard. Hobbes: Prince of Peace (Polity Press, 2010).
- Lloyd, S.A. Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
- Lloyd, S.A. Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- Lloyd, S.A., ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
- Lloyd, S.A., ed. Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
- May, Larry. Limiting Leviathan: Hobbes on Laws and International Affairs (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Sreedhar, Susanne. Hobbes on Resistance: Defying the Leviathan (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- Zagorin, Perez. Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2009).
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