Behemoth Or The Long Parliament Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Behemoth or the Long Parliament I do here present you with a piece of Mr. Hobbes's writing, which is not published from an imperfect ms., as his Dialogue of the Civil Wars of England was (by some that had got accidentally a copy of it) absolutely against his consent, as you may see by some passages out of some of his letters to me which I have here inserted. In his letter of June, 1679, he saith: I would fain have published my Dialogue of the Civil Wars of England long ago, and to that end I presented it to his Majesty; and some days after, when I thought he had read it, I humbly besought him to let me print it; but his Majesty (though he heard me graciously, yet he) flatly refused to have it published. Therefore I brought away the book, and gave you leave to take a copy of it; which, when you had done, I gave the original to an honourable and learned friend, who about a year after died. The king knows better, and is more con cerned in publishing of books than I am therefore I dare not venture to appear in the business, lest it should offend him. Therefore I pray you not to meddle in the business. Rather than to be thought any way to further or counten ance the printing, I would be content to lose twenty times the value of what you can expect to gain by it, &c. To this now may be added the following unprinted passage from a letter, which was addressed at a still later date (august 19, 1679) by the aged philosopher to his friend John Aubrey (the end of it being inserted in Aubrey's Sketch of Hobbes's Life, published in Letters from the Bodleian, vol. Ii., ubz' m'd. P. Running thus: I have been told that my book of the civil war is come abroad. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Behemoth, or The Long Parliament is essential to any reader interested in the historical context of the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). In De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), the great political philosopher had developed an analytical framework for discussing sedition, rebellion, and the breakdown of authority. Behemoth, completed around 1668 and not published until after Hobbe's death, represents the systematic application of this framework to the English Civil War. In his insightful and substantial Introduction, Stephen Holmes examines the major themes and implications of Behemoth in Hobbes's system of thought. Holmes notes that a fresh consideration of Behemoth dispels persistent misreadings of Hobbes, including the idea that man is motivated solely by a desire for self-preservation. Behemoth, which is cast as a series of dialogues between a teacher and his pupil, locates the principal cause of the Civil War less in economic interests than in the stubborn irrationality of key actors. It also shows more vividly than any of Hobbe's other works the importance of religion in his theories of human nature and behavior.

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Tracing the relationships and networks of trust in Western European revolutionary situations from the Ancient Greeks to the French Revolution and beyond, Francesca Granelli here shows the essential role of trust in both revolution and government, arguing that without trust, both governments and revolutionary movements are liable to fail. The first study to combine the important of trust and the significance of revolution, this book offers a new lens through which to interpret revolution, in an essential work book for all scholars of political science and historians of revolution.