Written during the chaos of the English Civil War Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan asks how in a world of violence and horror can we 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. But his penetrating work of political philosophy - now fully revised and with a new introduction for this edition - opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world.