Hobbes named his theory of government after a biblical sea monster
Writing as England tore itself apart in civil war, Thomas Hobbes argued that only a single, undivided sovereign could save people from a life he called nasty, brutish and short. He published the case in 1651 under a deliberately provocative title borrowed from the monster in the Book of Job.
Hobbes lived from 1588 to 1679, and Leviathan appeared in 1651, with a revised Latin edition in 1668. It stands among the earliest and most influential statements of social contract theory: people agree to hand power to a sovereign because the alternative, a state of nature amounting to a war of all against all, is unbearable. The English Civil War, running from 1642 to 1651, gave the argument its urgency.
Most political treatises of the era carried plain descriptive titles, as Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Hobbes's own Elements of Law did. Choosing a poetic creature from Job signalled something bolder. Early modern word scholars even linked the name to Hebrew roots meaning to join together and a serpent or dragon, fitting for a body made of many joined parts.
That idea became one of the most famous images in print. The Parisian etcher Abraham Bosse, after long talks with Hobbes, produced a frontispiece showing a giant crowned figure rising over a landscape with a sword in one hand and a bishop's crosier in the other, under a Latin line from Job saying no earthly power compares with him. Below, paired panels set state against church: castle and cathedral, crown and mitre, cannon and excommunication.
The book opens by treating the state as an artificial machine, much as bodies can be explained mechanically. Hobbes insists on careful definitions and nominalism, holding that only names are universal and that good and evil simply label what individuals desire or avoid. He rejects the old notion of a single greatest good, since human wants vary too much for one to exist. There is, however, a greatest evil, the fear of violent death, and a commonwealth can be organised around avoiding it.
Source: Leviathan (Hobbes book)
