The Textual History of Leviathan: The English Text and the Limits of Textual Consensus

<jats:p>The article is devoted to the textual foundations of a new Ukrainian translation of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. It is shown that neither of the two existing Ukrainian translations rests on an adequate textual basis: the first reproduces only the English version of 1651 in R. Tuck’s edition, while the second is a retranslation of the Russian translation of 1991, as demonstrated by a comparison of several passages. The paper analyses the controversy between G. A. J. Rogers and K. Schuhmann, on the one hand, and N. Malcolm, on the other hand, over the relation between the three versions of the English text – Head, Bear and 25 Ornaments – and establishes the limits of the textual consensus that must be taken into account in preparing a scholarly Ukrainian translation. A preliminary review is also given of the two editions that take the Latin text into account, those of E. Curley and N. Malcolm.</jats:p>