Thomas Hobbes 1588 – 1679

Thomas Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher whose 1651 book Leviathan is one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy and social contract theory. Writing during and after the English Civil War, he argued that in the natural condition of mankind, without an overarching political authority, life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He held that rational individuals would consent to absolute sovereignty as the price of escaping this condition. His broader philosophical system, set out in works including De Cive and De Corpore, is mechanistic and materialist, treating thought and society as motions of matter governed by natural laws. His political thought provoked sustained replies from Locke, Rousseau, and the long line of social contract theorists who followed.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was the most rigorous political philosopher of seventeenth-century England and one of the founding figures of modern political thought. Born prematurely on hearing news of the Spanish Armada — fear and I were born twins, he later wrote — he served as tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family and traveled extensively on the Continent, where he encountered Galileo, Mersenne, and Descartes.

Leviathan (1651) is Hobbes's masterpiece and one of the most influential single books in modern political philosophy. The argument moves systematically from a materialist psychology of human passions through the analysis of the state of nature — a war of all against all in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — to the rational case for the absolute sovereign authority that alone can secure peace. The work was condemned by both royalists (for its secular grounding) and parliamentarians (for its absolutism), and Hobbes spent the rest of his long life defending it.

Hobbes's earlier and later works — De Cive, De Corpore, Behemoth — develop the philosophical materialism, the social-contract framework, and the historical-political analysis that Leviathan synthesizes. His geometric ambitions were largely unsuccessful; his political philosophy reshaped the modern conceptual vocabulary of sovereignty, contract, and rights. He died in his ninety-second year, a remarkable lifespan for the period, in Hardwick Hall.