Abstract

Hobbes's Leviathan transformed forever the meaning of the term, long debated by Biblical commentators. Alternatively, in the Book of Job chapter 41, a great chthonic beast, or Lucifer?like ?King of all the Children of Pride?, Leviathan for Hobbes was a figure for the modern state. Recent work by Quentin Skinner and Noel Malcolm treats Leviathan as in part a story about representation. But by juxtaposing the thesis of Carl Schmitt, juridical architect of the Third Reich, and author if his own startling Leviathan, which reads the Biblical Beast as representing the state as demonic machine, we see not only Hobbes's purpose in invoking the God of fear, but also how it served as a self?fulfilling prophecy