ABSTRACT
Leviathan is the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language. And the history of our civilization can provide only a few works of similar scope and achievement to set beside it. But Leviathan is more than a tour de force. and something of its larger character will be perceived if we read it with the other works of Hobbes open beside it. Leviathan is a myth, the transposition of an abstract argument into the world of the imagination. Any account worth giving of the argument of Leviathan must be an interpretation; and this account, because it is an interpretation, is not a substitute for the text. The nature of man is the predicament of mankind. A knowledge of this nature is to be had from introspection, each man reading himself in order to discern in himself, mankind. Civil philosophy begins with this sort of knowledge of the nature of man.
