Dialogue, Behemoth, & Rhetoric

A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England is a little-known late writing of Hobbes, which reveals an unexplored dimension of his famous doctrine of sovereignty. The essay was first published posthumously in 1681. In the Dialogue, Hobbes sets forth his mature reflections of the relation between reason and law, reflections more "liberal" than those found in Leviathan and his other well-known writings. Hobbes proposes a separation of the functions of government in the interest of common sense and humaneness without visibly violating his dictum that the sharing or division of sovereignty is an absurdity. Behemoth was written in 1668 as a follow-up to a previous and scandalous political work, Leviathan (1651). Leviathan is a representation of an ideal political world, and Behemoth has been considered to be a contrasting treatise on what happens when the very worst abuses of government come to pass. Hobbes applied his understanding of the science of human nature to explain why the English Civil War came to pass. He was able to do this because he "did not make an impassable gulf between his rational understanding on the one hand and the particular events which he witnessed, remembered, or heard about on the other"... The Art of Rhetoric The Whole Art of Rhetoric (1637), The Art of Rhetoric, (a work that is not actually Hobbes, but rather Dudley Fenner's work originally published in 1584, and was previously published under Hobbes name) and the Art of Sophistry by Thomas Hobbes. All three works encapsulate what was thought to be Hobbes' work on rhetoric.