Behemoth or the Long Parliament [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION T-^ EHEMOTH was completed in manuscript around 1668, when Thomas Hobbes was almost eighty years old. Some pirated editions were published in the late 1670s; but an authorized version of the book was not printed until 1682. In a letter of 19 June 1679, written a few months before his death, Hobbes explained the frustrating delay: I would fain have published my Dialogue of the Civil Wars of England, long ago; and to that end I presented it to his Majesty: and some days after, when I thought he had read it, I humbly besought him to let me print it; but his Majesty, though he heard me graciously, yet he flatly refused to have it published.1 Charles II may have hesitated to license the work, despite its outspoken partisanship of the royalist cause, because of its equally outspoken, but politically awkward, anticlericalism.2 Hobbes had developed an analytical framework for discussing sedition, rebellion, and the breakdown of authority in earlier works, particularly in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). His 1 The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839-45), vol. 4: 411. 2 An interesting parallel could be drawn between Charles H's wary attitude toward Behemoth in 1668 and Louis XIV's refusal to lift an ecclesiastic ban on another powerful expression of seventeenth-century anticlericalism, Moliere's Tartuffe, between 1664 and 1669.