Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, has long been recognized as (in Michael Oakeshott’s words) “the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language.”¹ It certainly provoked violent opinions, both then and now. In Hobbes’s own time, his minimalist account of Christian belief advanced in the second half of the book (often omitted by careless modern readers) led to accusations of atheism, and Leviathan was solemnly burned in Oxford soon after his death. Luckily, he had been on good terms with Charles II, whom he had tutored in mathematics when the Prince had been in exile in Paris. In our time, Hobbes has been written down as a cynic about human nature and an absolutist in politics. Leviathan thus remains, in one degree or another, a scandalous book. That, as Samuel Pepys complained back in 1668, often made it expensive to buy.

Most human beings have lived within one encompassing culture.

In 1667, however, Hobbes, then aged seventy-nine and afflicted with palsy, translated his argument into Latin, the lingua franca of educated Europeans at the time. The Latin version was last reprinted in Molesworth’s edition of the Hobbesian canon, but that was in 1839. This version, much corrected, has now been edited and translated by Noel Malcolm in two annotated volumes (along with a further volume of introduction) as part of the Clarendon edition of Hobbes. Malcolm’s introduction explains the immediate context of the entire Hobbesian enterprise, and the