STRAUSS (Leo).

The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Its Basis and its Genesis.

First US edition. 8vo. xxii, 172 pp. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (just a hint of faint spotting to fore-edge of text block, contents otherwise unmarked; jacket slightly worn with minor loss to foot of spine and panel and upper portion of front panel, otherwise a very good copy overall). Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1952.

£150.00

‘In this classic analysis, Leo Strauss pinpoints what is original and innovative in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. He argues that Hobbes’s ideas arose not from tradition or science but from his own deep knowledge and experience of human nature. Tracing the development of Hobbes’s moral doctrine from his early writings to his major work The Leviathan, Strauss explains contradictions in the body of Hobbes’s work and discovers startling connections between Hobbes and the thought of Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel’ (publisher’s blurb).

Originally published in German in 1935, the English translation was first published in Britain in 1936. The present American edition included a new two-page preface by Leo Strauss.

Stock No.
258798