A Reader’s Companion to The Prince, Leviathan, and the Second Treatise

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke each sought a new foundation for political order. This book serves as a reader's companion to Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Locke’s Second Treatise written for graduate students and scholars seeking a fuller understanding of these classic texts. How do these philosophers respond to perennial questions such as why anyone is ever obligated to obey a government and whether there are any limits to such an obligation. In this book, Bookman begins by sorting out the hermeneutical controversy between textualists and contextualists, offers a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the texts punctuated by questions for the reader’s reflection, and finally suggests a firmer foundation for a theory of political obligation than Hobbes’s and Locke’s consent theories. Also included are bibliographical essays keyed to select bibliographies, providing readers with a wide-ranging, critical review of the secondary literature. Intended to be read alongside the primary work, the work is a full intellectual, critical, and bibliographical history, as well as a fresh examination of three classic texts in political theory and philosophy.

• Machiavelli
• Hobbes
• Locke
• Leviathan
• The Prince
• Second Treatise
• Bibliographical history
• Classic political theory
• political philosophy
• Political Order
• democracy

• Department of Political Science, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO, USA

  John T. Bookman

​John T. Bookman is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Northern Colorado, USA. He is the author of The Mythology of American Politics: A Critical Response to Fundamental Questions (2008) and, with Stephen T. Powers, The March to Victory (1986). He taught political philosophy and American politics for many years to undergraduate and graduate students.

Policies and ethics