This book offers the first study on the relation between the political thought of Thomas Hobbes and the emerging public sphere of early 17th century Britain. It shows how Hobbes’s Leviathan can be seen as a philosophical and political response to the media revolution first ushered in by the printing press and later radicalized by the dramatic events of the British Civil Wars. It explains how Hobbes found the root causes of these wars in the struggle for public support wagered by power-hungry clerics and politicians. As this struggle was carried out through informal means such news and pamphlets, aesthetic representations and public mobilization, the book shows how Hobbes devised a complex theory of government to counter the destabilizing tendencies of such strategies. This theory was in turn premised upon a revised conception of human psychology. The book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in the history of philosophy, political thought, the political culture of the early modern period and the emergence of the public sphere.

Esben Korsgaard Rasmussen holds a PhD degree from the University of Copenhagen (2022) with studies at Paris-Sorbonne IV (2014-2015). From 2023 to 2025, he was Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford, and researcher at the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History. He has been a visiting researcher at École Normale Superieure de Lyon, Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and the University of Groningen. Since 2025, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a fellow at Human Abilities: Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Berlin. His primary research interest lie in the intersection between theories of government and the transformations of Aristotelian psychology in the early modern period. He has translated Aristotle’s Politica (2023) into Danish and is currently working on a translation of De anima.