All or almost all of the central points of Leviathan had been made by Hobbes in early books and manuscripts. The materialism, mechanism, and absolutism are all there in The Elements of Law, Anti-White, and De Cive. Still, it is Leviathan that deserves to be called ‘A Bible for Modern Man’ because no other work of his or any of his contemporaries presents such a forceful, eloquent, and comprehensive statement of the doctrine that expresses the spirit of modern thought. It adumbrates a physics, physiology, psychology, morality, politics, and critical theology.

(A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 225)