De Cive: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society

Published in 1651, the subject matter of De Cive (the Citizen) is identical with that of his Leviathan (which was published the same year). The difference between the two lies in their format. De Cive is Hobbes' attempt to make explicit the deductions referred to in Leviathan. There is only one natural that everybody has the right to everything. And from this proposition, taking a cue from Euclid (as did Descartes), Hobbes deduces the structure of the state, outlining the power of the sovereign, and the place of his subjects, their duties, rights, and privileges. In this work he is more conscious to set out his premises and refers to previous chapters and articles to show his deductions.As in Leviathan, we see what Hobbes thought of the sovereign state which is formed by social contract to rescue humans from a perpetual state of war - it is a monster created by humans. But a necessary monster, without which the lifespan of a human in the resulting perpetual state of war is “nasty, brutish, and short.”This is a well-edited text (with modernized English) of Thomas Hobbes’ Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, (more often referred to today as simply as De Cive) from The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, collected and edited by Sir William Molesworth, London, 1839.