The Elements of Natural and Political Law is Hobbes's first political work. Written in 1640, they circulated in manuscript, just before Hobbes returned to France where he remained in exile for eleven years to escape the horrors of the English civil war. The writing of this work is therefore directly linked to the political context. However, Hobbes accomplished a radical deterritorialization of politics. Far from starting, like all his predecessors, from history or nature, he tears politics from both to root it in a theory of human nature. It is undoubtedly difficult to measure the revolution that such a decision constitutes. Hobbes undoubtedly aims to enlighten his fellow citizens on the true rules which govern political artifice and without which the body politic collapses like a house of cards in civil war, but to achieve this it is necessary to found politics as a science. He therefore decontextualizes politics to reach its essence and its truth. This is the extreme audacity of this philosophy to which those who intend to read it as if it were an occasional writing whose meaning would be entirely reducible at the time of its writing are blind. The present volume includes the first critical edition of this text since the Tonnies edition, which is, on many points, corrected here. The translation is in fact based on establishing the text from all the manuscripts that we know. The basic text is provided by the manuscript which includes autograph corrections by Hobbes. We will also find textual, historical and philosophical annotations which clarify the reading.