Thomas Hobbes Elements Of Law Clarendon Edition Of The Works Of Thomas Hobbes Johann P Sommerville by Johann P. Sommerville 9780199586257, 019958625X instant download after payment.

Hobbes’s Elements of Law, completed (if it ever was) in 1640, contains the first version of his political theory. In 1641 he finished De Cive, and ten years later he published the third and largest exposition of his pol­it­ ical ideas, Leviathan, of which a Latin edition came out in 1668. Many of the central ideas of the later books already appear in EL. Noel Malcolm observes that EL was ‘a work of extraordinary assurance, an almost fully fledged statement of Hobbes’s entire political philosophy’, and ‘no mere polemical pamphlet’. The two later versions of his theory, says Malcolm, would fur­ ther develop some points of detail, ‘but the essential lineaments would remain the same’.1 It was written in Hobbes’s fine English prose, and is not a translation by someone else from his Latin (as, say, English versions of his De Cive are).