Edited with an Introduction and Notes by J. C. A. GASKIN
Publication Information : Book Title : The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic : Part I. Human Nature, Part II, de Corpore Politico ; with Three Lives. Contributors : John Aubrey – author, J. C. A. Gaskin – editor, Thomas Hobbes – author. Publisher : Oxford University Press. Place of Publication : Oxford. Publication Year : 1999.
PREFACE
It has been for long more difficult to read Hobbes than to read about him. This deplorable state of affairs is because with the signal exception of Leviathan–most of his works are difficult to find outside great libraries. The present volume is some attempt to put that right. The Elements of Law is Hobbes’s first major work, one of his most succinct and challenging, and an anticipation of much for which he is famous in Leviathan.
The introduction briefly sets The Elements of Law in its historical context and makes a somewhat more extensive attempt to explain, and occasionally to comment upon, Hobbes’s grand system of philosophy–a system not immediately apparent from The Elements of Law read in isolation. The chapters from De Corpore are appended because of their striking relevance to some of the early chapters in The Elements of Law, their intrinsic interest, and the chronic unavailability of the original work.
I am grateful to the Bodleian Library for facilitating the republication of their very rare copy of the 1680 translation of Hobbes ‘Verse Life’, and to Mary Lyons for her scholarly and stylish attention to the new translation of Hobbes ‘Prose Life’. These autobiographies, never before published together in translation, along with the abstract of John Aubrey ‘Brief Life’, form a unique collection of material on Hobbes.