Some Reflections on Critical-Text Editing

‘Is your edition really necessary?’ is one of those questions which are so searching that they are rarely asked in polite intellectual society. It comes from the best of sources, and it is important not least because it raises fundamental questions—about why editing of a certain sort is necessary and about the criteria according to which it is carried out. Why, indeed, should anyone undertake critical editing? These questions can be addressed in several ways. This article addresses them by way of considering an edition which, it will be seen, is necessary. For Noel Malcolm’s is the first successful attempt to produce a critical-text edition of Leviathan. Here the reader is offered gold rather than base metal, and in considering such work it cannot be out of the way to ask the questions, both particular and general, that arise from reflecting on it. Neither can it be untimely to do so just now, when textual scholars in the West are becoming more conscious of the basic fact that their practices are not the only ones.