Those three editions are all very, very good. And there’s another edition that’s recently come out by David Johnston, with Norton, which also has lightly modernized the spellings to make it easier for a contemporary reader. There’s also an edition with modernized spelling that was done by Edwin Curley with Hackett. If that’s what you want, there’s a great edition by Richard Tuck for students that he edited as part of the Cambridge History of Political Thought series. That makes it more difficult for the student to read, but there are times when the original punctuation is relevant for the meaning of what’s happening, it helps you to understand. There are editions that preserve the 17th-century spelling and punctuation. That does sound very impressive, but if a reader can’t stretch to that, and wants a more student-type volume, is there a particular edition of Leviathan that you’d recommend? There are also guides to key words whose 17th century meaning would be different from 21st century English. He’s checked all the various different manuscripts and the published editions of Leviathan to check for variants and so on. He highlights where they’re different from each other in a way that is not obtrusive, so if you don’t care about the Latin, you can just read the English and go forward. For example, he will translate the passages in Leviathan that are different from the English one, so that if someone doesn’t read Latin, they can see what those are. He doesn’t give you so much commentary, just editorial apparatus. Is it running commentary on the differences between the two? It’s an incredible service to the scholarly community. So you get both texts, and he has this tremendous editorial apparatus that allows you to compare the similarities and differences between the two of them. Then the other two volumes are the text of the English Leviathan, face to face with Hobbes’s Latin translation of Leviathan. It gives you a sense of when it was written, how it was written, and so on. Noel Malcolm is one of the great Hobbes scholars of our time, and it sets Leviathan in context.

The first volume is the introduction by Noel Malcolm. It’s in three volumes and very elaborate. It’s edited by Noel Malcolm, with an incredible level of scholarship. Yes, it’s a landmark in Hobbes scholarship. You’ve recommended a particular edition of Leviathan, the Oxford Clarendon edition edited by Noel Malcolm.

Which edition of Leviathan should I read?

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