Leviathan

'The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'

Written during the chaos of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan asks how, in a world of violence and horror, we can stop ourselves from descending into anarchy? Hobbes' case for a 'common-wealth' under a powerful sovereign — or 'Leviathan' — to enforce security and the rule of law shocked his contemporaries, and his book was publicly burnt for sedition the moment it was published.