Thomas Hobbes wrote in the shadow of the English Civil War, and his conviction that only an overwhelming sovereign could save people from a war of all against all still unsettles readers. He is the starting point of modern political philosophy, and the thinkers who answered him, Locke and Rousseau, are best read in his company. A good order supplies that context.
The path sets the stage, reads the masterwork, follows the replies, and ends with the scholarship.
Setting the stage
Start with a map of the terrain. A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell places Hobbes in the long conversation and is a pleasure to read on its own. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli is the earlier work of hard-eyed political realism that Hobbes inherits and radicalizes, so it makes a fitting prelude to his system.
The masterwork
The center is Leviathan, Hobbes's rigorous argument that people escape the terror of the state of nature only by surrendering their power to a sovereign. It is a bracing, uncompromising book, as much about human psychology and language as about politics, and it repays close attention to its logic.
The replies and the scholarship
Hobbes provoked the tradition that answered him. Second Treatise of Government by John Locke argues for natural rights and limited government against Hobbesian absolutism, and The Social Contract and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau reimagines the contract around the general will. To study the argument closely, Hobbes and the social contract tradition by Jean Hampton is a first-rate analysis of the logic, and The Cambridge companion to Hobbes's Leviathan, edited by Patricia Springborg, gathers essays on every dimension of the book.
Read in this order and Hobbes stops being a caricature of authoritarianism and becomes the sharp, disturbing thinker who set the terms of modern politics. Follow the full path to read him and his critics together.
