Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford University Press; 1,832 pages; $375 and £195. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHEN Thomas Hobbes was maths tutor to the future English king, Charles II, in Paris in 1646, his young charge reportedly found Britain’s first great modern philosopher to be “the oddest fellow he ever met with”. That was one of the nicer things said about the “Monster of Malmesbury”, as one pamphleteer called him. Hobbes was the most vilified thinker in British history, and he had almost no defenders in his own country for about a century after his death in 1679 at the then-remarkable age of 91.

Hobbes’s early reputation fared better on the continent. But at home some people said that the Great Fire of London in 1666, and an outbreak of bubonic plague a year earlier—Daniel Defoe’s “Plague Year”—was God’s way of punishing England for tolerating such an impious wretch. A few weeks after the fire a parliamentary committee started to look into “such books as tend to Atheism”, particularly Hobbes’s best-known treatise, “Leviathan”. He was told that some bishops wanted him dead. Understandably, he destroyed many of his private papers, which is one reason why the life and work of Hobbes has long been such a tricky subject for scholars.

But things are looking up for the Monster, thanks to the labours of Noel Malcolm, a polymath at All Souls College, Oxford, and a former journalist and commentator. In the 1990s Dr Malcolm transformed the study of Hobbes by assembling and annotating his surviving correspondence. Dr Malcolm seems to have read, and judiciously assessed, everything that may be relevant to everything that may be relevant (this includes graveyard inscriptions, so it can fairly be said that he leaves no stone unturned). He has now published the first fully critical edition of “Leviathan”, including the different, and shorter, Latin version, which Hobbes published some 17 years after the English text that anglophone students of politics study to this day. Anyone who wonders why Hobbes used the name of a biblical sea-beast that was traditionally identified with the devil to refer to the state, or commonwealth, “to which…we owe our peace and defence”, will find the obscure but likeliest solution to this puzzle, and others, uncovered here.

How did Hobbes make so many enemies? Even aside from his politics, of which more later, there was plenty of provocation in his writings. There were tirades against Aristotle and scholasticism, aimed at the universities. There were attacks on theologians, who, Hobbes maintained, claimed to know more about God than mortal minds could discover. There was an account of psychology that was taken to show man as irredeemably selfish. Hobbes also lobbied for a reduction in the power of the churches. He held that religious disputes should be adjudicated by the sovereign of each country, which is one reason why he excoriated Catholicism, a transnational religion. (Hobbes’s own father was a cleric, as it happens: a semi-literate drunk, who was obliged to disappear when Hobbes was a boy, after beating up another clergyman in a churchyard.)

Above all, though, it was Hobbes’s scientific materialism that rendered him an anathema. Like Descartes, and other devotees of the “new philosophy” pioneered by Galileo, Hobbes regarded nature as a machine. But he took this idea further than anyone else and maintained that absolutely everything is physical. There are no immaterial spirits: man’s immortality begins with the resurrection of his body. And God himself is a physical being. This is what made Hobbes an “atheist” to practically everyone except himself. For most of history an “atheist” was a man who worshipped the wrong God, not no God at all; a physical God, as imagined by Hobbes, was not really God.

Hobbes’s idea is one of the rarest heresies in the history of Christianity. Some have claimed that Tertullian, one of the Latin Fathers of the Church, believed it. But the idea was abhorrent to all denominations until the 19th century, when the new American religion of Mormonism adopted it. Like Hobbes, Mormons maintain that the Bible means what it says in the passages that describe man as made in God’s image. If Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in next month’s American presidential election, believes the scriptures of his own religion, he accepts that God the Father “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s”—the very belief which caused Hobbes to be vilified for centuries. (This may turn out to be the least of Mr Romney’s problems.)

A modern materialism, as opposed to the ancient materialism of Democritus, was one of Hobbes’s two main philosophical innovations. The other was a novel way to see government: Hobbes’s method in political philosophy was the opposite of Utopianism. Instead of describing an ideal society, as Plato does in “The Republic”, Hobbes starts by imagining the horrors of a lawless world, where everyone is left to fend for themselves. The result, as he famously wrote, would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” To avoid this result, man must cede his natural right of self-defence, and much else, to a sovereign authority with very broad powers, preferably an absolute monarch. Anything less leads to hellish consequences.

Hobbes lived through England’s civil wars, and several wars of religion on the continent. Did these terrifying times prompt him to offer a cure that was worse than the disease? That is the gist of some virtuoso invective by Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British historian who died in 2003. Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, summed up “Leviathan” curtly: “The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism.”

Hobbes would probably have acknowledged the first part: he admitted to being a fearful type. His mother was frightened into labour by the rumoured approach of the Spanish Armada, leading Hobbes to quip that she “Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear.” Logic? He is guilty as charged. His provocative reasoning on a host of topics kick-started modern British philosophy. As for despotism, that is a hard question. Dr Malcolm’s edition of “Leviathan” may help readers to decide if that is a fair description of what the Monster had in mind.