History

Reading Hobbes in the pandemic

Item: Confronting Leviathan
Author: David Kearns

David Runciman’s intellectual history in an age of crisis

by David Kearns •

January–February 2022, no. 439

Confronting Leviathan: A history of ideas by David Runciman

Profile Books, $39.99 hb, 287 pp

History

Reading Hobbes in the pandemic

David Runciman’s intellectual history in an age of crisis

by David Kearns •

January–February 2022, no. 439

Detail from the frontispiece of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, 1951, engraving by Abraham Bosse

In ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul … giving life and motion to the whole body’. This ‘Artificiall man’ was to ensure ‘the peoples safety’, and the means at its disposal were limitless. The sovereign was ‘not subject to the Civill Lawes’ and could abrogate any ‘Lawes that trouble him’. Leviathan was published in 1651, written by Hobbes while exiled in France after fleeing the English Civil Wars. The Wars had already produced almost 200,000 deaths, including that of Charles I, beheaded in 1649 following a conviction of treason by Parliament.

David Kearns

David Kearns is Lecturer in Legal History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland. His work focuses on the Australian reception of the common law. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2020, and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge in 2015. David examines the history of the early modern common law, including debates over the relationship between the common law, state, and sovereignty, and the Australian reception of these debates.