“The King over All t he Children of Pride” (Job 41:26) and the State

Abstract

The article is a review of A. Filippov’s monograph “The Leviathan Uprising”. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan appears here not just as a historical monument, but as a working model of how power works. A. Filippov emphasizes that Hobbes’ importance is enormous, it is literally not transitory, not decreasing, but only increasing with time, and in the twenty‑first century this is more obvious than in the eighteenth or nineteenth. The article evaluates the thesis that Hobbes does not “justify tyranny,” he dispassionately describes the technology of survival of the human race in an environment where “man is a wolf to man.” Leviathan is scary, but he is the only thing that separates us from the abyss.