Abstract

At least from Bentham's time, the dominant interpretive approaches to Hobbes's Leviathan have tended to soften and blur the despotic message of that book. Writers of otherwise very different persuasions and pursuing very different intellectual agendas have sought to soften the way Hobbes's political theory has been understood. In the effort to insulate and preserve obviously valuable aspects of that theory, the elements of tyranny so significant to the text of Leviathan have been ignored, distorted, obscured and denied. The upshot has been to portray Hobbes as no more than a harmless proto-liberal