• Born: 5 April 1588
• Birthplace: Westport, Wiltshire, England
• Died: 4 December 1679
• Best Known As: English philosopher who wrote Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher who wrote the 1651 book, Leviathan, a political treatise that described the natural life of mankind as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes was educated at Oxford and worked as a tutor to the son of William Cavendish, later the Earl of Devonshire. His connections to the royal family gave him opportunities to travel and pursue his studies, but they also put him in the middle of the English Civil War. In 1640 political turmoil forced him to leave England for France, where he continued to associate with scholars and scientists of Europe, including Galileo and René Descartes. In his philosophical works, Hobbes wrote that matter and motion are the only valid subjects for philosophy. In Leviathan, he argued that man's natural state is anti-social, and that moral rules are created to avoid chaos. Hobbes's notion that social authority can come from the people -- and not necessarily a monarch -- rankled his royal associates, but helped him reconcile with Oliver Cromwell and the English revolutionaries, and he returned to England shortly after Leviathan was published. After the Restoration of 1660, Hobbes was favored by King Charles II, who granted him a pension, but urged him to clear future publications with the throne. Hobbes's "nasty, brutish and short" line is still used often when students and politicians discuss human nature and the proper role of government.

Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century British philosopher who argued that human life in its natural state is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," made an appearance in a New York Times column by David Brooks on the grisly beginning of the 21st century, including but not limited to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina:

"It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil."

Link: The Bursting Point

Posted September 5, 2005.

See our Word Overheard blog to see interesting uses of strange words.

The English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the central figures of British empiricism. His major work, "Leviathan, " published in 1651, expressed his principle of materialism and his concept of a social contract forming the basis of society.

Born prematurely on April 5, 1588, when his mother heard of the impending invasion of the Spanish Armada, Thomas Hobbes later reported that "my mother gave birth to twins, myself and fear." His father was the vicar of Westport near Malmesbury in Gloucestershire. He abandoned his family to escape punishment for fighting with another clergyman "at the church door." Thereafter Thomas was raised and educated by an uncle. At local schools he became a proficient classicist, translating a Greek tragedy into Latin iambics by the time he was 14. From 1603 to 1608 he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was bored by the prevailing philosophy of Aristotelianism.

The 20-year-old future philosopher became a tutor to the Cavendish family. This virtually lifelong association with the successive earls of Devonshire provided him with an extensive private library, foreign travel, and introductions to influential people. Hobbes, however, was slow in developing his thought; his first work a translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian Wars, did not appear until 1629. Thucydides held that knowledge of the past was useful for determining correct action, and Hobbes said that he offered the translation during a period of civil unrest as a reminder that the ancients believed democracy to be the least effective form of government.

According to his own estimate the crucial intellectual event of Hobbes's life occurred when he was 40. While waiting for a friend he wandered into a library and chanced to find a copy of Euclid's geometry. Opening the book, he read a random proposition and exclaimed, "By God that is impossible!" Fascinated by the interconnections between axioms, postulates, and premises, he adopted the ideal of demonstrating certainty by way of deductive reasoning. His interest in mathematics is reflected in his second work, A Short Treatise on First Principles, which presents a mechanical interpretation of sensation, as well as in his brief stint as mathematics tutor to Charles II. His generally royalist sympathy as expressed in The Elements of Law (1640) caused Hobbes to leave England during the "Long Parliament." This was the first of many trips back and forth between England and the Continent during periods of civil strife since he was, in his own words, "the first of all that fled." For the rest of his long life Hobbes traveled extensively and published prolifically. In France he met René Descartes and the anti-Cartesian Pierre Gassendi. In 1640 he wrote one of the sets of objections to Descartes's Meditations.

Although born into the Elizabethan Age, Hobbes outlived all of the major 17th-century thinkers. He became a sort of English institution and continued writing, offering new translations of Homer in his 80s because he had "nothing else to do." When he was past 90, he became embroiled in controversies with the Royal Society. He invited friends to suggest appropriate epitaphs and favored one that read "this is the true philosopher's stone." He died on Dec. 4, 1679, at the age of 91.

His Philosophy

The diverse intellectual currents of the 17th century, which are generically called modern classical philosophy, began with a unanimous repudiation of the authorities of the past, especially Aristotle and the scholastic tradition. Descartes, who founded the rationalist tradition, and his contemporary Sir Francis Bacon, who is considered the originator of modern empiricism, both sought new methodologies for achieving scientific knowledge and a systematic conception of reality. Hobbes knew both of these thinkers, and his system encompassed the advantages of both rationalism and empiricism. As a logician, he believed too strongly in the power of deductive reasoning from definitions to share Bacon's exclusive enthusiasm for inductive generalizations from experience. Yet Hobbes was a more consistent empiricist and nominalist, and his attacks on the misuse of language exceed even those of Bacon. And unlike Descartes, Hobbes viewed reason as summation of consequences rather than an innate, originative source of new knowledge.

Psychology, as the mechanics of knowing, rather than epistemology is the source of Hobbes's singularity. He was fascinated by the problem of sense perception, and he extended Galileo's mechanical physics into an explanation of human cognition. The origin of all thought is sensation which consists of mental images produced by the pressure of motion of external objects. Thus Hobbes anticipates later thought by distinguishing between the external object and the internal image. These sense images are extended by the power of memory and imagination. Understanding and reason, which distinguish men from other animals, consist entirely in the ability to use speech.

Speech is the power to transform images into words or names. Words serve as the marks of remembrance, signification, conception, or self-expression. For example, to speak of a cause-and-effect relation is merely to impose names and define their connection. When two names are so joined that the definition of one contains the other, then the proposition is true. The implications of Hobbes's analysis are quite modern. First, there is an implicit distinction between objects and their appearance to man's senses. Consequently knowledge is discourse about appearances. Universals are merely names understood as class concepts, and they have no real status, for everything which appears "is individual and singular." Since "true and false are attributes of speech and not of things, " scientific and philosophic thinking consists in using names correctly. Reason is calculation or "reckoning the consequences of general laws agreed upon for either marking or signifying." The power of the mind is the capacity to reduce consequences to general laws or theorems either by deducing consequences from principles or by inductively reasoning from particular perceptions to general principles. The privilege of mind is subject to unfortunate abuse because, in Hobbes's pithy phrase, men turn from summarizing the consequences of things "into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations, " that is, using faulty definitions, inventing terms which stand for nothing, and assuming that universals are real.

The material and mechanical model of nature offered Hobbes a consistent analogy. Man is a conditioned part of nature, and reason is neither an innate faculty nor the summation of random experience but is acquired through slow cultivation and industry. Science is the cumulative knowledge of syllogistic reasoning which gradually reveals the dependence of one fact upon another. Such knowledge is conditionally valid and enables the mind to move progressively from abstract and simple to more particular and complex sciences: geometry, mechanics, physics, morals (the nature of mind and desire), politics.

Political Thought

Hobbes explains the connection between nature, man, and society through the law of inertia. A moving object continues to move until impeded by another force, and "trains of imagination" or speculation are abated only by logical demonstrations. So also man's liberty or desire to do what he wants is checked only by an equal and opposite need for security. A society or commonwealth "is but an artificial man" invented by man, and to understand polity one should merely read himself as part of nature.

Such a reading is cold comfort because presocial life is characterized by Hobbes, in a famous quotation, as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The equality of human desire is matched by an economy of natural satisfactions. Men are addicted to power because its acquisition is the only guarantee of living well. Such men live in "a state of perpetual war" driven by competition and desire for the same goods. The important consequence of this view is man's natural right and liberty to seek self-preservation by any means. In this state of nature there is no value above self-interest because where there is no common, coercive power there is no law and no justice. But there is a second and derivative law of nature that men may surrender or transfer their individual will to the state. This "social contract" binds the individual to treat others as he expects to be treated by them. Only a constituted civil power commands sufficient force to compel everyone to fulfill this original compact by which men exchange liberty for security.

In Hobbes's view the sovereign power of a commonwealth is absolute and not subject to the laws and obligations of citizens. Obedience remains as long as the sovereign fulfills the social compact by protecting the rights of the individual. Consequently rebellion is unjust, by definition, but should the cause of revolution prevail, a new absolute sovereignty is created.

Further Reading

The standard edition is The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth (11 vols. 1839-1845). In addition see The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, edited by Ferdinand Tönnies (1928); Body, Mind and Citizen, edited by Richard S. Peters (1962); and Leviathan, edited by Michael Oakeshott (1962).

There is a wealth of good secondary literature available. John Aubrey included a biography of his friend Hobbes in Brief Lives, edited by Oliver Lawson Dick (1950). Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (trans. 1936); Leslie Stephen, Hobbes (1904); and Richard Peters, Hobbes (1956), are excellent studies.

Consult also John Larid, Hobbes (1934); Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1940); John Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (1952); Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1962); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes of Locke (1962); J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of PhilosophicalTheories (1965); and F. S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of Leviathan (1968).

(1588-1679) One of the greatest of all political philosophers, the most brilliant and profound ever to have written in English. Hobbes was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire (he joked that ‘Fear and I were born twins’ because his mother went into labour out of shock at the news of the Spanish Armada) and rescued from an unpromising background by a far-sighted schoolmaster. Hobbes studied at Oxford, where he learnt a contempt for the philosophy of Plato and, especially, Aristotle that stayed for life. He then joined the family of the Earls (later Dukes) of Devonshire as a tutor. He remained associated with the family until his death; he is buried at Ault Hucknall, in the parish of the Devonshire house at Hardwick. He had suggested that ‘This is the true philosopher's stone’ be inscribed on his tombstone, but settled for a more modest Latin inscription.

As a political theorist, Hobbes was a late starter. His first publication is a plain and muscular translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (1628). Hobbes chose Thucydides because he was ‘the most politick historiographer that ever writ’. Thucydides recounts the decline of Athenian democracy from the high ideals of Pericles to incompetence and realpolitik. Hobbes saw Thucydides as a warning to the parliamentarians who 1628 were mounting the challenge to royal authority that was to culminate in the English Civil War. Hobbes was then an anti-democrat first and an absolutist second. Soon after this, Hobbes had an encounter which changed his life. In the words of Hobbes's friend and biographer John Aubrey, ‘Being in a gentleman's library . . . Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I [which is Pythagoras’ Theorem on the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle]. “By G—”, sayd he…“this is impossible!” So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps [and so on], that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry', which Hobbes would later describe as ‘the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind’.

Geometry seemed to him to give certainty in science. Hobbes was fascinated by scientific method, which he studied in the work of Galileo (1564-1642), Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650, of whom Hobbes said ‘Had he kept himself to Geometry he had been the best Geometer in the world but…his head did not lye for philosophy’), and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). Hobbes had briefly worked for Bacon as a young man, and visited Gassendi, Descartes, and Galileo when his patron toured Europe. Hobbes's resolutive-compositive method was influenced by Bacon and Descartes, but was closer to that of Galileo than either. It involved the following thought-experiment. Take something, such as civil society, apart. Examine its fundamental elements. Make a rational reconstruction of the necessary principles on which it works. Hobbes gave several expositions of his political theory, in The Elements of Law (written 1640, published 1650), in De Cive (The Citizen, 1642), and above all in Leviathan (1651). Here Hobbes sets out first what he takes to be axioms of human behaviour analogous to the geometrical axioms that underpin Euclid's system. Hobbes's axioms are that men are rational and desire above all their own preservation. Hence they are led by ‘a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power’ to a condition of ‘warre . . . of every man, against every man’ in the state of nature. Realizing, however, that life in the state of nature would be ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’, rational men would agree to a social contract in which each conditionally hands over his arms to a third party if each other will do the same. The third party thus empowered is called the Sovereign, who has been authorized to do anything except order a subject to kill himself. Thus Hobbes derives absolutist conclusions from individualist premisses. Writing just after the English Civil War, Hobbes insists that one should not challenge authority, denouncing both the Puritan appeal to conscience against the State and the Catholic appeal to the Church against the State. But Hobbes's reasoning is ruthlessly unsentimental. Once Charles I has been overthrown by Oliver Cromwell, the argument for obedience to Charles immediately becomes an argument for obedience to Oliver. (Hobbes's philosophy does not tell the rational citizen when to make that leap.) It is absolutist first, and anti-democratic second. The Sovereign need not be one man. It may be an assembly, so long as it is an assembly with an odd number of members to avoid becoming stalemated (a typically Hobbesian touch). Thus Hobbes's approach is entirely compatible with a doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. He repeats his arguments for undivided sovereignty in his later works A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (written 1666, published 1681) and Behemoth (a history of the English Civil War, written 1668, published 1679). With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Hobbes had once again become a monarchist (and indeed was protected by Charles II); however, this simply followed consistently from his views on sovereignty.

It is frequently objected that if people in the state of nature are as Hobbes says they are, they might sign the social contract but would immediately fail to carry out the promises they had made; whereas if people are not as he says they are, there is no need for the Sovereign to be given absolute power. It is still not clear whether Hobbes can be defended against this attack, but close reading of Hobbes's argument against the ‘Foole’ in chapter 15 of Leviathan suggests that he can.

Note that the state of nature in Hobbes is not, as it perhaps is in both Locke and Rousseau, an attempt to describe an actual state of affairs. It is a rational reconstruction of what would happen were people the sort of rational maximizers Hobbes has them axiomatically as being. Hobbes tries to construct both physical science and social science on these common deductive principles. On both fronts, his work is generally regarded as a magnificent failure. Hobbes is the main precursor of the modern rational choice approach to politics, and many writers have tried to rework the central arguments of Leviathan in terms of game theory.

Many of the arguments of Leviathan have set the terms of subsequent debate. For instance, Hobbes's discussion of sovereignty and authorization (Leviathan, chapter 16) insists that sovereignty cannot be divided—the opinion that it can leads to civil war, in his view—and that subjects are the authors of everything the sovereign does as their agent. The first of these claims is generally accepted, the second is not. But what has emerged in recent years as principal-agent theory may be regarded as a long footnote to Hobbes. How can principals (citizens) control their agents (governments)? Hobbes sets the question but does not provide a satisfactory answer. As Locke sarcastically observed, the argument that people would hand over their right of self-preservation to one man ‘is to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions’.

Hobbes's religious position is much disputed. He was not a straightforward atheist or agnostic, although superstitious people blamed the Fire of London of 1666 on him. He was probably a deist, who believed that God was necessary, as a ‘first cause’, to explain how matter came into being. He was witheringly contemptuous of religion (‘For it is with the mysteries of our Religion, as with wholsome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the vertue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect’) but devotes half of Leviathan to theology, essentially in order to pre-empt all religious challenges to his doctrine of absolute sovereignty.

Hobbes is valuable not least because of the beautiful clarity and style of his language. He claimed that ‘True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things. And where Speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood’. In this he is one of the fathers of analytical philosophy.

For more information on Thomas Hobbes, visit Britannica.com.

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679). Philosopher. Hobbes is without doubt the greatest political philosopher to have written in the English language. After graduating from Oxford, he devoted his very long life to private tutoring and study. In 1651 he published in English Leviathan masterpiece, in which he set out systematically an ingenious social contractarian case for an authoritarian government. Hobbes argued that the state of nature (i.e. the pre-political condition) was a condition of ‘war of all against all’, since humans are by nature moved by competitiveness, fear, and pride to coerce others. They would contract together to establish an absolute ruler, since that was the only way in which their security could be guaranteed.

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679) English philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. Hobbes was born of an impoverished clerical family in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. He was fond of the joke that his mother fell into labour with him on hearing the rumour of the Spanish Armada coming, ‘so that fear and I were born twins together’. At school he quickly excelled, making a reputation as a linguist and fluent poet and translator. After Oxford he entered the employment of William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, and except for a short interval remained secretary, tutor, and general adviser to the family for the rest of his career. His employment included several ‘Grand Tours’, during which he met the leading European intellectuals of his time. He and his patron took a particular interest in the devious political affairs of Venice, and from this political literature Hobbes became acquainted with sceptical attitudes towards political morality (see Machiavelli), the inadvisability of commitments such as those of religion and patriotism, and the necessity for people to look after their own interests to the exclusion of others. As a spokesman for the royalist Devonshires, Hobbes was caught up in the turmoil preceding the Civil War, and fled to France in 1640, remaining there until 1651. During this period he published the short Elements of Law, partly as a kind of brief for his patrons to use on behalf of the sovereign, but also as a general (and most accessible) statement of his philosophy. He was also busy on a major treatise to be known as the Elements of Philosophy. Part III of this was published as De Cive (The Citizen) in 1642. De Corpore (On Matter) appeared in 1656, and De Homine (Man) in 1658. Human Nature had appeared in 1650, and his most famous work, Leviathan, was published in 1651 (the title is a reference to Job 41, in which the terrifying power of the sea monster is described: a metaphor for the absolute power of Hobbes's state).

In its time Leviathan shocked Hobbes's friends (who had looked to him for a defence of the English royalty against the puritan revolution), mainly because of its attack on the Church of England and its endorsement of the freedom of religion from state and ecclesiastical control. This was the very doctrine associated with Cromwell's party. From this time onwards Hobbes became ‘the Beast of Malmesbury’, a symbol of atheism, egoism, and heresy, and although his defence of the independence of religious life was indeed congenial to Cromwell, Hobbes lived in serious danger of prosecution after the restoration of Charles II. Hobbes's principal interests in his later years were translations, and he lived out his old age at the Devonshire's home, Hardwick, allegedly remarking that he ‘was 91 years finding a hole to go out of this world, and at length found it’.

In his writings on physics Hobbes shared the general Cartesian outlook of his time, but with several variations. His (early) theory of light was prescient in postulating a pulsating source for light, as opposed to the mechanical connection between the eye and its object postulated by Descartes. He believed that ‘whatsoever accidents and qualities that our sense makes us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only’ (Elements of Law, i. 2. 10). The real cause of these seemings are external ‘motions’. Hobbes had no time for the Cartesian appeal to the deity as the foundation of natural knowledge. His general sympathy with the solipsistic or sceptical predicament led him to the interesting position that words and reasoning (both of which are available to the person whose whole life is a dream) are essentially self-contained; their relationship to the outside world is not what matters to their meaning (see content, wide and narrow). Hobbes frequently took as his paradigm of science the self-contained axiomatic system of Euclidean geometry, which had always inspired him and in which he dabbled extensively. Part of his dislike of the rising scientific establishment of the time concerned the use of technical language, and Hobbes is one of the earliest British philosophers both to pay attention to and mistrust the enchantment of words: ‘words are wise mens' counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles’ (Leviathan). His realism about the power of civil society and pessimism about philosophical systems and ‘right reason’ imply what is currently thought of as modern pragmatism, or even the postmodernist doctrine that, in linguistic matters, might is right. He held, for instance, that ‘upon the occasion of some strange and deformed birth, it shall not be decided by Aristotle, or the philosophers, whether the same be a Man or no, but by the Laws’ (Elements of Law, ii. 10. 8), which if true would put many thinkers in fields such as bioethics out of business. His life in political and religious controversy also gave him a sage mistrust of the rhetorical power of empty words.

Hobbes's political and ethical writings set the agenda for much subsequent theorizing. In ethics his mechanical philosophy leads him to identify the judgement that a thing is good with the purely personal pleasure felt upon contemplating it (a suggestion later refined by Hume). He follows Grotius in taking the universal desire for self-preservation as giving rise to a fundamental right. Imagining people without a social or civil order, we see the emergence of that order as a device for self-preservation, a way of avoiding the ‘war of every man against every man’ that constitutes the state of nature, ‘and the life of man nasty, solitary, brutish and short’ (Leviathan, ch. 13). The remedy is the appointment of a sovereign, and a trade of personal freedom in return for personal safety. The doctrine of the absolute power of the sovereign that this seems to imply caused a good deal of trouble to Hobbes (and his commentators). The other famous crux is how men can contract together (promise) in order to lift themselves from the state of nature into civil society, for Hobbes himself sees clearly that the first person to make a promise and then turn aside from his own interests to keep it, ‘does but betraye himself his enemy’ (ch. 14).

Hobbes remains permanently important, not least because his adoption of a rigorously minimal metaphysics (materialism) and ethics (a kind of egoism), and his impatience with theory that does not confront these underlying truths squarely, make him the permanent model for sceptical and pragmatic philosophies.

(hŏbz) , 1588–1679, English philosopher, grad. Magdalen College, Oxford, 1608. For many years a tutor in the Cavendish family, Hobbes took great interest in mathematics, physics, and the contemporary rationalism. On journeys to the Continent he established friendly relations with many learned men, including Galileo and Gassendi. In 1640, after his political writings had brought him into disfavor with the parliamentarians, he went to France (where he was tutor to the exiled Prince Charles). His work, however, aroused the antagonism of the English group in France, and his thorough materialism offended the churchmen, so that in 1651 he felt impelled to return to England, where he was able to live peacefully. Among his important works, which appeared in several revisions under different titles (see Sir W. Molesworth's edition of the complete works, 11 vol., 1839–45), are De Cive (1642), Leviathan (1651), De Corpore Politico (1650), De Homine (1658), and Behemoth (1680). In the Leviathan, Hobbes developed his political philosophy. He argued from a mechanistic view that life is simply the motions of the organism and that man is by nature a selfishly individualistic animal at constant war with all other men. In a state of nature, men are equal in their self-seeking and live out lives which are “nasty, brutish, and short.” Fear of violent death is the principal motive which causes men to create a state by contracting to surrender their natural rights and to submit to the absolute authority of a sovereign. Although the power of the sovereign derived originally from the people—a challenge to the doctrine of the divine right of kings—the sovereign's power is absolute and not subject to the law. Temporal power is also always superior to ecclesiastical power. Though Hobbes favored a monarchy as the most efficient form of sovereignty, his theory could apply equally well to king or parliament. His political philosophy led to investigations by other political theorists, e.g., Locke, Spinoza, and Rousseau, who formulated their own radically different theories of the social contract.

Bibliography

See biographies by J. L. Stephen (1934, repr. 1968), C. H. Hinnant (1977), and T. Surrell (1986); studies by T. A. Sprague, Jr. (1973), J. W. N. Watkins (rev. ed. 1973), W. Von Leyden (1982), and J. Hampton (1988).

Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), English philosopher. Thomas Hobbes, perhaps the greatest of the English philosophers, was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, in 1588. The son of the disreputable vicar of Westport, he was raised by a wealthy uncle who saw to his education and his admission to Magdalen Hall, Oxford (B.A., 1608). After Oxford, Hobbes became tutor to the son of William Cavendish, the earl of Derbyshire, and remained attached to the Cavendish family throughout his life.

Hobbes's early association with Francis Bacon (1561–1626) strengthened what would become a lifelong dislike of Aristotelian philosophy that he had acquired at Oxford in opposition to his tutors. But he retained an interest in classical literature and published a translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in 1629 and a translation of Homer in quatrains in 1674–1675. Hobbes's discovery of geometry, his association with Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), and the friendship of Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) provided him with the analytic scheme and scientific method for which he had been searching to undergird a complete philosophy of nature and society. An association with the Great Tew circle (a group of men of letters who met at Great Tew, Lord Falkland's house north of Oxford) seems to have helped to move him from a humanistic and classical view of the world to one that was—in contrast to the appeals to the Bible that charged the outlooks of so many of his contemporaries—decidedly juridical and modern and drawn from the political crises that led to the English Civil War. His Elements of the Law, circulated in manuscript in 1640 and published in two parts in 1650, was the first statement of the darkly pessimistic view of human nature and call for undivided, absolute sovereignty for which he is known.

In late 1640—fearing for his life, he claimed, when the Long Parliament began its work—Hobbes fled to France, where he was welcomed by Mersenne's circle and where he served briefly as tutor to the Prince of Wales (the exiled and future King Charles II). In France, he enjoyed his most productive philosophic period, culminating in the publication of his masterpiece, Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, in 1651 shortly before he returned to England.

The aim of Leviathan, as announced in the Preface and in the Review and Conclusion, was to demonstrate, in the context of the recently concluded Civil War, the necessity of strong, overarching, unchallengeable government. The work was a distillation and an extension of Hobbes's quest for a comprehensive philosophy that moved from accounts of ultimate reality and human nature, through logic and reason, to a radically new understanding of politics that was also an attack on virtually all religious beliefs and practices. The political genius of Leviathan was its use of the emerging natural law, natural rights, and social contract theories and a radically individualistic conception of human nature in conjunction with the new science rather than the more conventional divine right doctrines to defend political absolutism. In one of the most memorable phrases in the history of political thought, Hobbes described life in the pre-political state of nature as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, ch. 13), the only remedy for which was the agreement to form a civil society with an absolute ruler at its head. For his efforts Hobbes was rewarded with the scorn of his contemporaries, especially for his apparent atheism, although the earliest critic of political theory, the divine right patriarchal royalist Sir Robert Filmer praised his conclusions while objecting to their foundations.

After the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes continued to work on his systematic philosophy and to attract critics. He enjoyed the patronage and probably the protection of the restored King Charles II, but he was attacked by Parliament after the Great Fire of 1666 and ultimately forbidden the right to publish. Nonetheless, he wrote Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, an account of English history during the period of the Civil War and Interregnum viewed from the perspective of his conceptions of human nature and politics, and an uncompleted Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Law, which offered a conception of law and sovereignty that is suggestive of the theories of J. L. Austin (1911–1960). Both works were published posthumously, in 1681 and 1682 respectively.

Hobbes's philosophic system, pointedly anti-Scholastic and anti-Aristotelian, was naturalistic and mechanistic; knowledge and understanding were rooted in experience. His metaphysics is often summarized as "matter in motion," and he was untroubled by some of the pressing problems of his day—and of subsequent philosophy—including accounting for the non-perceptual existence of phenomena and causation. Human beings, while capable of reason, are driven by their passions and motivated by fear, especially of one another. They are irreducibly self-interested and will cooperate only when they believe that it is to their advantage. All this was demonstrated by Hobbes's theory of the state of nature as altogether without institutions and relationships and as a condition in which everyone enjoyed an equal, natural freedom and had the natural right to all things and no corresponding obligations or duties, leading to the famous "war of every man against every man" (Leviathan, ch. 13)—hence, the description of life in that situation that was quoted above.

Although he believed that there was a law of nature, Hobbes's conception was altogether unlike the traditional view. His law of nature did not bind human actions in the absence of sufficient security, did not contain a body of moral and ethical principles, and was not truly the product of divine will. It was, however, discernable through reason, and its first principle was self-preservation. According to Hobbes, natural law commanded that people seek peace but only when others were willing to do so as well. It dictated that they agree to a social compact instituting an absolute sovereign who would maintain this conventionally established peace and to whom everyone was politically obligated because they had agreed to his rule because he "personated" them and their institutes, and because he had the legitimate power to punish their disobedience with death, which was their greatest fear. Although Hobbes believed that the establishment of a strong ruler would eventually lead to a less brutal and anxious life for the members of civil society, the psychology of the state of nature remained just beneath the surface of all human endeavors, kept in check by habits of forbearance maintained by fear of the sovereign.

Hobbes died in 1679 in the Cavendish home, Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, and was buried nearby. Witty to the end, he composed epitaphs for himself, his favorite of which was, "This is the true Philosopher's Stone." It was not used.

Bibliography

Johnston, David. The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation. Princeton, 1986.

Malcolm, Noel. Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford and New York, 2002.

Martinich, A. P. Hobbes: A Biography. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.

Rogers, G. A. J., and Alan Ryan, eds. Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes. Oxford and New York, 1988.

Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

—GORDON SCHOCHET

Sixteenth-century political theorist, philosopher, and scientist Thomas Hobbes left a stark warning to succeeding generations: strong central authority is the necessary basis for government. In several influential works of legal, political, psychological, and philosophical theory, Hobbes's view of society and its leaders was founded on pessimism. He saw people as weak and selfish, and thus in constant need of the governance that could save them from destruction. These ideas profoundly affected the Federalists during the early formation of U.S. law. The Federalists turned to Hobbes's work for justification for passage of the U.S. Constitution as well as for intellectual support for their own movement in the years following that passage. Today, Hobbes is read not only for his lasting contributions to political-legal theory in general but for the ideas that helped shape U.S. history.

Born on April 5, 1588, in Westport, Wiltshire, England, the son of an Anglican clergyman, Hobbes was a prodigy. By the age of fifteen, he had entered Oxford University; by twenty, he was appointed tutor to a prominent family, a post he would later hold with the Prince of Wales. His considerable output of work began with English translations of Francis Bacon and Thucydides while he was in his late thirties. Soon, mathematics interested him, and his travels brought him into contact with some of the greatest minds of his age: Galileo and René Descartes. His writing canvassed many subjects, such as language and science, to arrive at a general theory of people and their leaders. The most influential works of this polymath came in the 1650s: Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), De Corpore (1655), and Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656). Hobbes died December 4, 1679, at age 91.

Hobbes was a supreme pessimist. To him, people were inherently selfish; they struggled constantly against one another for survival. "[T]he life of a man," he wrote in his masterwork, Leviathan, "is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Thus, people could not survive on their own in the state of nature. This foundation led him to a theory of the law: only by submitting to the protection of a sovereign power could individuals avoid constant anarchy and war. The sovereign's authority would have to be absolute. Law derived from this authority rather than from objective truth, which he argued did not exist. All citizens of the state were morally bound to follow the sovereign's authority; otherwise, law could not function. Hobbes chose the leviathan (a large sea animal) to represent the state, and he maintained that like a whale, the state could only be guided by one intelligence: its sovereign's.

The influence of Hobbes's ideas varied dramatically over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. English politicians and clerics derided him as a heretic. But his theories eventually lent support to loyalists who wanted to preserve the Crown's control over the American colonies: Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of Massachusetts, viewed the upstart challengers to royal authority in a Hobbesian light. Later, Hobbes proved useful to the other side: after the American Revolution, his ideas influenced the Federalists in their arguments for adoption of the federal Constitution in 1787. Embracing Hobbes's pessimism, the Federalists saw the American people as unable to survive as a nation without a strong central government that would protect them from foreign powers.

Hobbes is still taught, and scholars continue to discuss contemporary legal issues in the light of his critique. Particularly relevant are his insights into the form of law and the interrelationship of law and politics, and his subtle explorations of language and meaning.

Quotes:

"The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only."

"I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark."

"The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind."

"Sudden glory is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter."

"Man is distinguished, not only by his reason; but also by this singular passion from other animals... which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure."

"Leisure is the mother of Philosophy."

See more famous quotes by Thomas Hobbes