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Charissa's Reviews > Leviathan

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

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Leviathan
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Not only did I disagree with Hobbes' conclusions, I find his assumptions (his arguments based entirely in Christian perspective) essentially worthless. The only value this tract served to me is to "know thy enemy". This is a classic example of mental circus tricks being used to justify the march of Christian dominance across the globe. I can't think of any written text that I despise more, except perhaps Mein Kempf.

Hobbes is my least favorite philosopher. He embodies everything I despise in Western thought. If I met Hobbes in the street I would flash him my tits and then slap him in the face and call him a pervert.

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Reading Progress

January 1, 1997 –Finished Reading

November 28, 2007 – Shelved

Comments Showing 1-50 of 98 (98 new)

W.B. Not today, sweetheart.

Can you help me figure something out? The system said someone named Xxx left me a comment on one of my reviews...it was one of my one stars..i don't give many...and there was nothing there when i got there...i'm assuming this was probably someone pissed...probably someone defending the author's "honor"....

How do you find out who Xxx (one upper case X two lower case) is or what the profile looks like? I'm betting it's a "nonce" account created only to leave something they knew would violate system rules...

any help darlin'...i know you're like a tech whiz...

xo b

message 2: by brian (new)

brian you can't really argue too strongly with hobbes's most famous neologism, can you, charissa? "Nasty, brutish, and short" just about sums it up. particularly in hobbes's time, eh?

W.B. clue on the evaluation...sometimes when things are SOOO horrid, they are interesting in their own right...

Charissa Brian... I'm sure Hobbes did feel that life then was only "nasty, brutish and short". But our view of the world tends to reflect our own personality, does it not? I don't know if there are any records about Hobbes' height, but I'm guessing it was under 5' 9". Nasty little midget man.

W.B. lol. i like that. would look great on a t-shirt of a short person with a good sense of humor:

NASTY LITTLE MIDGET MAN.

might even get the short guy laid in a bar.

Charissa WB... that's a good point... it has at least given me something to complain about.

Tosh I never read Hobbes, except for the comic strip 'Calvin and Hobbes." Hobbes was the toy tigar right? What's the connection between Hobbes and 'Hobbes?"

Charissa you know Tosh, I never did figure that out. I read Calvin and Hobbes like crazy, hoping against hope to find a secret message in there which would reveal the artist's insight into the mysteries of Hobbesian logic. But alas! I was foiled.

I did however name my favorite cat after Hobbes the tiger. How's that for irony?

W.B. I prefer Hobson to Hobbes. As in "Hobson's choice." Now there's a workable philosophy for the real world.

W.B. I figured it was a cowardly "defender." Either the system censored their attempt to prescribe taste for others, or they self-censored their own "short, nasty and brutish" little hateration lol.

W.B. Thanks, Tracy...i don't know the infrastructure here well...you seem to be the maven!

W.B. Touche! God bless Wikipedia...and Texas just a little.

Charissa I like the Hobson Choice. It's sort of like having freedom from choice. Something we desperately need sometimes here in the land of multiplicity.

W.B. Tracy...smiling....i hope that's not something bad....i'll have to ask Alta-Vista lol....

W.B. Ok, beloved. If we learned anything from the Bottoming Thread, it was how important trust is. lol.

W.B. I knew that love...i'm not totally dense....Ljubljana has been on my tongue more than once...although I might have spelled it wrong...too lazy to check...do you like Salamun's poetry? He's fun...

W.B. I mean he's Slovenian..but since we're doing the Lj thing lol....

W.B. Oh, I don't know, dear...I'm not that prescriptive...I found this copy of The Selected Poems of Tomaz Salamun eons ago and have enjoyed it off and on over the years...various translators....cum grano salis...wait i said cum...xo b

Tristan Hobbes the tiger was named after this Hobbes because they both share a dim view of human nature, if I remember right.

Also, while I enjoyed this work, I think that those not too interested in Western political theory and it's history might also react violently like Charissa. Not that I agree with most of Hobbes, but that's not the point. Rather, what does reading this reveal about political though sense and the basic problems of society, state, and anarchy? I certainly wouldn't want to live in a state Hobbes designed, but that doesn't mean I can't learn from him without declaring him an enemy of human existence.

Also amusing, Hobbes was charged with being an Atheist in his day. While this was certainly not true, his philosophy seems pretty inconsistent with most religious thought, though he tries very hard to ignore this conclusion.

Mpc1 Tristan's comment is thoughtful and reflective. Charissa's, not so much.

And thank you Tristan for not threatening a dead philosopher with the prospect of flashing him your 'tits.' Hobbes doesn't need that, it could only aggravate his present state.

Greg Charissa,
Hobbes is mostly interested in the church because it gave Oliver Cromwell (and those like him) power.
I believe most readings put Hobbes' religion somewhere between dry atheism and heretical weirdness.

"The Leviathan" might be subtitled "How to Stop Oliver Cromwell, and therefore the English Civil War, From Happening."

Kenny Yeah, you completely misunderstood him. He's one of the first political thinkers (along with Machiavelli) NOT to base his theories on Christian doctrine. That's one of the most revolutionary aspects of his thought. The section of Leviathan you refer to shows that absolute sovereignty is CONSISTENT with the Bible as Hobbes interprets it--this was a necessary thing to argue because the enemies of the state in Hobbes' time unanimously justified their opposition by saying "true" Christianity required it. But he 100% does NOT use Biblical doctrine as the logical basis of his arguments for sovereignty (the first 2 books), whereas the later and much more popular thinker John Locke does. Hobbes was widely considered an atheist, and still is.

message 23: by James (new)

James Hobbes was an atheist.

Athens I dislike your review.

Brandyn Lee I hope that you noticed that the second two parts of the book were a complete repudiation of many commonly held beliefs held by Christians about the Bible and Christianity.

Jesse You gave him free cable?

Carlos Vieira "If I met Hobbes in the street I would flash him my tits and then slap him in the face and call him a pervert." - Charissa

"Slowly revealing the best, the sweetest, slowly stripping reality, an erotic march towards higher perception of the subtle?" - Mythack

Mythack, if flashing titties and slaps are your version of a slow erotic stripping towards the subtle, I really don't want to know what sudden and aggressive is.

Tristram Shandy Reading your "review" of "Leviathan" left me convinced that the only way you ever interacted with this book was probably by sitting on it.

I mean anyone who has sat on a book a few hours can come up with a garbled rendition of assumptions the author never made (Hobbes did definitely not have in mind the spreading of Christianity) and of bullshit such as likening this book to Mein Ke[!]mpf.

I hope you'll find a more comfortable book to sit on these days.

message 29: by CDMA (new)

CDMA Yea, I agree with everybody else who pointed out that Hobbes was an atheist because, well, he was. I don't know where the whole "Christian perspective" came from, but if anything, he seemed to be against the church stood for. So please, Charissa, do explain the Christian perspective in this case.

message 30: by Conor (new)

Conor Vulgar and inane review.

John I wanted to like this review, but ultimately could not get into its groove, man.

message 32: by CDMA (new)

CDMA Conor wrote: "Vulgar and inane review."

Agreed.

Eupolemos This review needs to die and go away. I shouldn't be commenting on it.

message 34: by Darcy (new)

Darcy Shiz Very bad review, grave misunderstanding of the time it was written and context.

message 35: by Darcy (new)

Darcy Shiz For those who said Hobbes was an atheist, not true, he was accused of being an atheist and Leviathan was banned in England because of it, in fact he was criticizing the Catholic Church and raising questions as to some of it's practices...in those days, that brought upon the label of "atheist"

Kenny Darcy, Hobbes' problems with conventional Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, go a lot further than that. He insists that everything that exists must be material substance (Hobbes is constantly explaining that "incorporeal substance" is nonsense), which seems to mean God must be a physical being too if he exists.

While Hobbes does affirm the "argument from the necessity of a first cause" as proof of God's existence, he negates most of what Christians say about him. For Hobbes, theological claims are generally nonsensical and even insulting in that they assume that humans can understand God's nature.

Check out the third and fourth books of Leviathan for some pretty radical readings of the Bible, in line with Hobbes' materialist philosophy and absolutist politics. While I don't think anybody can know what his "real" beliefs were, as opposed to what he wrote (only a crazy person would have denied God's existence in print in the seventeenth century), what he did write put him at odds with the vast majority of Christians of his time.

Jon You flash your 'tits' assault the man and he's the pervert? And of course the classic jab and association to Nazism. Riiight...

Kikistone I would love to know which is your field of study, because while I recognize that Hobbes is not for everyone he is one of the greatest political thinkers... Just because you don't like what he has to say, it doesn't mean that you get to compare The Leviathan with Mein Kampf*. Also, if you know anything about the inner workings of International Relations and Politics you realize that Hobbes is not only the father of Realism, but also correct on how states behave.

Imre Bártfai What a primitive reader...

Gabriela This review is priceless. Savage!

message 41: by Miccy (new)

Miccy Parker Alonzo, let me please smell sarcasm in your tone.

message 42: by Miccy (new)

Miccy Parker Imre everything I wanted to say to her.

message 43: by Becky (new)

Becky Snow I'm trying to read Leviathon because I think it might be important to understanding *something*, but it's awfully boring. does it get better, and are there any glimmers of insight? like, now that I have read a bunch of Plato, I totally get a lot of the federalist papers. should I just give up & toss it for good?

Jesse You do realize he's an atheist and a materialist, right?

= Naty (and my axe!) = This is the best review I ever read.

Stephan What a funny review. It is down right savage and primitive, but funny nonetheless. However, such freedom of expression and pathetic display of emotions might be featured as a magnet for creeps and masochists like me. Talking about equal rights I could not imagine any man's review in a similar tone surviving the filter of what is adequate or inadequate. Say is I wrote something like ‘If I met Emily Bronte in the street I would flash her with my penis, squirt on her skirt and then call her a whore’. Imagine the responses her. It’s not fair; we men also want to enjoy the freedom to express ourselves like that. However, your review is exceptional, for no matter how shallow, idiotic and nonsocial it may seem (believe me I know it from my humor books) it is vital for Goodreads. Humor is important; otherwise people would die out of boring intellectualism. Therefore, in the spirit of humor my sarcastic response to your review is: Darling, I am much more annoying than Hobbes. In fact I am the least of all philosophers, and the sleaziest of all poets, and sometimes I even walk the streets. Furthermore, I also believe in the principle of ‘If some angry reader slaps your right cheek turn to her the other also’
Cheers and thanks for the good laugh

Jeromy Lethebe I got the sense Hobbes was a deist and believed in god insomuch as he believed that there needed to be an entity that began "motion". Furthermore it's pretty obvious that Hobbes does not see Christianity as a requirement for his political philosophy, but rather sees it as an optional tool.

Kikistone In order to understand this book and its author you need to understand the situation of his birth and his life. This is so much more than “know thy enemy”. A lot of people consider Hobbes’ Leviathan to be a more in-depth work that follows Machiavelli’s The Prince. It is a work of political thought that is consider a master piece even by those who despise it, at least in philosophy and political science. Further, Hobbes, who you would so blatantly disrespect, is considered the father of a political current of thought called realism that is, quite frankly, the one by which all countries operate under in the international arena. A self-help system, determined by the constant state of anarchy created by the lack of a supranational entity to control state interaction; humans as self-interested creatures who do all the things they do, even things like charity and acts of kindness, because it benefits and makes them fell good about themselves. Life as a zero-sum game where there are unlimited wants but limited resources that create the ultimate reality that any gain someone else has is a loss for you, by definition. If you think his philosophical stance is a load of crap, well, that’s perfectly fine since opinions are like belly buttons, everyone has one. However, I’d encourage you to look at an environment that we bump into daily that demonstrate the validity of Hobbes’ stance. As I was writing this review i thought of top 10 american law schools and how the grading is in the shape of a forced curve; where there are a limited amount of top grades, and everyone wants them. If you consider this, the stories of pages being ripped from library books, the fact that no one helps other people, and frankly the nasty sabotage doesn’t seem so crazy.

Unapologetic Autist You sounds like a disgruntled feminist whose parents never said no to you.

David But from reading the book it is clear that Hobbes is a secularist, and in fact, makes one of the earliest and most powerful arguments for the divorce of Church and State. I understand not liking his premises, or his unending and tortured theological ratiocinations (to use the frustrating old English) of why he was ‘right’ in his ideas that took up an immense portion of the book, but he certainly doesn’t seem to be advocating the march or spread of Christianity around the globe.

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