Leviathan

Book excerpt: Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil is a book written by an English materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes about problems of the state existence and development. Leviathan is a name of a Bible monster, a symbol of nature powers that belittles a man. Hobbes uses this character to describe a powerful state (“God of the death”). He starts with a postulate about a natural human state (“the war of all against all”) and develops the idea “man is a wolf to a man”. When people stay for a long time in the position of an inevitable extermination they give a part of their natural rights, for the sake of their lives and general peace, according to an unspoken agreement to someone who is obliged to maintain a free usage of the rest of their rights – to the state. The state, a union of people, where the will of a single one (the state) is compulsory for everybody, has a task to regulate the relations between all the people. The book was banned several times in England and Russia.