''The life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short''

Written during the chaos of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes'' Leviathan asks how, in a world of violence and horror, can we stop ourselves from descending into anarchy? Hobbes'' case for a ''common-wealth'' under a powerful sovereign - or ''Leviathan'' - to enforce security and the rule of law, shocked his contemporaries, and his book was publicly burnt for sedition the moment it was published. But his penetrating work of political philosophy opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world.

Edited with an Introduction by Christopher Brooke