And Hobbes Complete Collection Paperback

Getting Your Hands on the Complete Works and Actually Reading Them

The Hobbes complete collection in paperback shows up in a few different forms depending on which publisher you track down. The main ones people actually cite are the Cambridge Library Collection reprint of the original volumes and the Oxford World's Classics selected works that some bookstores bundle together. There's also the Lecker and other trade paperbacks that compile translations of Leviathan, De Cive, The Elements of Law, and the shorter treatises into one or two large volumes. The specific one that tends to come up on forums and used-book sites is the hardcover-to-paperback reprint sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and academic distributors. I'll be straightforward about this. The paperback editions of Hobbes's complete works aren't exactly easy to find sitting on a shelf at your local bookstore. You're looking at three main channels. First is Amazon, where multiple editions compete and the prices swing between about $18 and $45 depending on which publisher and printing you pick. Second is used book sites like AbeBooks, ThriftBooks, and Biblio. This is actually where I found a decent copy of a Clarendon Press collection for twelve dollars that was in fine condition. Third is direct from academic publishers if you want something with proper scholarship behind it. Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press both sell paperbacks directly, though their shipping can make the deal less attractive if you're not buying multiple items. The edition I keep coming back to is the Cambridge Library Collection one. It's not the most expensive option, it reproduces the original typography fairly accurately, and the paper quality is decent enough that it won't fall apart after a few readings. The Oxford World's Classics selections are tighter and cheaper but they leave out a lot of the lesser treatises. If you're looking for the And Hobbes Complete Collection Paperback specifically, check the ISBN on whichever edition interests you before buying. The reprints have different ISBNs every time they go through a new printing run, and you'll end up with the wrong thing if you just search by title alone.

What's Actually Inside These Collections

A complete Hobbes collection typically contains Leviathan, of course, along with De Cive, The Elements of Law, The Liberty and Obligation of a Subject, Behemoth, and a scattering of shorter essays on optics, geometry, and natural philosophy. Some editions throw in translations of the Thucydides or the Ovid Epistles. The Cambridge edition is the most comprehensive because it pulls from the original folios and includes the correspondence and the autobiographical poem too. The trade paperbacks tend to be more selective, which isn't necessarily a bad thing since Hobbes can be brutally repetitive across his different treatises. Here's something most guides don't mention. Leviathan and De Cive overlap substantially in their first two parts. If you're reading them back to back in a complete collection, you'll notice Hobbes essentially restates his arguments about human nature and the social contract with minor variations. This wasn't laziness on his part. He was refining his position and responding to critics who engaged with one text but not the other. Reading them together in a collected edition like this is actually useful because you can see the evolution. Just don't expect each work to stand on its own without the context of the others.

Practical Problems and How to Deal With Them

The biggest issue I ran into with my first copy was the pagination. Different printings of the same collection use different page numbers, and every secondary source you read — every Stanford Encyclopedia entry, every lecture video, every academic paper — references a specific page. When I tried to look up a passage I remembered from a lecture, the page number was completely wrong because my edition had reflowed the text for the paperback format. The workaround was simple but not obvious if you haven't dealt with this before. Every reliable edition of Hobbes includes a section numbering system built into the text itself. Leviathan has numbered chapters, and De Cive has numbered sections. You don't need page numbers. If someone references Chapter 13 of Leviathan, it's the same chapter regardless of which paperback you're holding. I learned this after wasting an afternoon tracking down what I thought was a missing passage, only to realize I was looking at a different edition's pagination. Another problem with the complete collection format is that the physical books are large and heavy. The Cambridge complete edition runs over six hundred pages per volume and the paper is thin enough to read through if you hold it up to light. It's not a comfortable book to hold for extended reading sessions. I ended up using it as a reference text and relying on a separate lighter edition of just Leviathan for actual cover-to-cover reading. The trade-off is you lose the convenience of having everything in one place, but your neck will thank you.

What Beginners Miss About Reading Hobbes

The first thing people get wrong is the order. You don't need to start with Leviathan, and for many readers starting there is the worst possible approach. Leviathan is Hobbes at his most polished and his most polemical, which means he's writing against positions he developed over decades. If you haven't seen those positions form in his earlier works, a lot of his arguments feel like they're targeting ghosts. The Elements of Law, written in 1640, is shorter and more accessible, and it lays out the core framework in a way that makes Leviathan readable. De Cive came next and refined the political theory. From there Leviathan becomes a restatement with more rhetoric attached rather than a completely new argument. The second thing people miss is that Hobbes is arguing against specific opponents. When he talks about Aristotle, it's not a general swipe at classical philosophy. He's responding to particular Renaissance interpretations that were dominant in the universities of his time. The complete collection helps here because you get the longer philosophical works alongside the political ones, and you can see how his materialist metaphysics underpins his politics. The individual treatises don't always make that connection explicit, but it's there if you read them together.

When This Edition Isn't the Right Move

The complete collection paperback isn't ideal if you're a casual reader who wants to dip in and out. The sheer weight of the material — Hobbes wrote a lot and he wrote it densely — makes it easy to get bogged down. If you're only going to read one thing by Hobbes, get Leviathan in a standalone edition with proper notes. The Cambridge edition with Richard Tuck's introduction is the standard for a reason. The complete collection is for people who are doing sustained study or who plan to reference multiple works regularly. It's also not great if you need crisp modern English. Hobbes wrote in seventeenth-century English, and while the grammar is clearer than something by Donne or Hooker, it still requires active effort. Some translations of his Latin works into English are better than others, and the complete collections sometimes mix editions that vary in quality. If your goal is to understand Hobbes's political philosophy for a political theory class or for general knowledge, the complete collection is overkill. You'd be better off with a curated selection and a companion guide. The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes or A Companion to Hobbes by some of the major scholars in the field will give you more directional reading than plowing through every essay and treatise he ever produced. But if you want the complete record and the convenience of having everything bound together, the paperback complete collection does that job adequately. Just be aware of the pagination trap and read The Elements of Law before Leviathan.