If you know nothing of the history of ideas, or history of any kind, never mind. The book can be read better than many contemporary works of all disciplines. You can read even more pleased that many recent novels. Hobbes is a thinker at all the classic sense of the word, says something interesting and readable in philosophy, physics, politics, sociology, anthropology and so on. There are passages that seem to be a lexicographer, others of the best literature. There are chapters that seem written by Jack London and Rudyard Kipling, and others who remember the detail of Aristotle or speculative flight of Plato. A summa of horror, order, bestiality, the chaos of the worst and best of human nature. Hobbes's qualities as a writer are almost all: clear, penetrating, threatening, original and rare thing in a philosopher, a master's elusive in the placement of adjectives. I know only a few comparable data: Faulkner and García Márquez Onetti. These three are acknowledged masters in the use of triads. Well, take a look at this quartet of Hobbes: "And the life of man is solitary, short, brutal and miserable." A scorn lovers remind them that the book was banned, to the demure, a pillar of thought conservative. I can not imagine what else can be asked of a book.
Paul R. Arang or
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