An entirely unsophisticated copy of the second edition of this true classic in the history of political philosophy in which Hobbes famously argued that a rigid social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign is always preferable to the brutal anarchy of “the state of nature”. Hobbes’s conception of the State as an aggregate of individual’s in society who agree to hand over power to a central authority whose job it is to impose law and order is brilliantly epitomised by the books iconic engraved allegorical frontispiece, perhaps the most famous graphic representation of a political theory of all time.
Hobbes also articulated a specifically materialist philosophy of mind that stood in stark contrast to the separation of mind and body advocated by his contemporary René Descartes, instead emphasising the machine-like quality of the natural world, even discussing the possible creation of artificial life.
There are three editions of Leviathan each dated 1651 but distinguishable by the various the various printer’s woodcut devices to the title-pages (‘Head’, ‘Bear’ and ‘Ornaments’). The present example is the second edition with the woodcut device of Bear crouching amid a spray of foliate to the title-page and the name of the publisher Andrew Crooke misspelt ‘Ckooke’. This edition also has an erratic pagination with numerous printing errors to the page numbers, but the text is continuous and complete. It is thought to have been published outside of England, likely in Holland by Christoffel Conradus some time before the end of 1678, and also incorporated earlier pirated sheets printed by John Redmayne in 1670 (see Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, 2014, ed. Noel Malcolm, Vol. 1, pp. 226–58).
The ‘Bear’ edition is also particularly significant for incorporating substantial textual revisions by Hobbes himself, as outlined by G.A.J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann in the Introduction to their definitive critical edition of Leviathan:
“It is clear beyond all reasonable doubt that the Bear edition contains about thirty changes – a number of a scale that, in seventeenth-century terms, one can expect author’s corrections in a work of the size of Leviathan to amount to – that unequivocally derive from Hobbes. A plausible hypothesis is that the stylistic and doctrinal corrections by Hobbes – for which one seeks in vain among the different copies of the Head edition – are the ones to be found in the Bear edition. On this reading … the Bear edition would be, so to speak, nothing but the second and (with regard to the Hobbesian corrections it incorporates) better half of the first edition of Leviathan” (Rogers & Schuhmann, ‘Introduction’, in Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes, Thoemmes, 2003, pp. 145-6).
Provenance: engraved armorial bookplate of ‘William Wilshere’ to front pastedown, probably William Wilshere (1754-1824) of The Frythe and Hitchin, lawyer and banker, founder of the British School in Hertfordshire.
Macdonald & Hargreaves, Thomas Hobbes: A Bibliography, 43; Printing and the Mind of Man, 138 (first edition).
