Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher whose book Leviathan (1651) is one of the founding works of modern political thought. Writing in the shadow of civil war, he argued that without a strong sovereign power human life would collapse into a war of all against all, and that people therefore have overwhelming reason to accept government. He also developed a thoroughly materialist account of nature and the mind, which made him one of the most controversial thinkers of his century.

Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 at Westport, beside Malmesbury in Wiltshire. He later joked that his mother gave birth to him early out of fear of the approaching Spanish Armada, so that "fear and I were born twins". His father, a poorly educated vicar, abandoned the family after a brawl, and Thomas was brought up with help from a prosperous uncle. He learned Latin and Greek well at local schools and studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he found the scholastic logic and physics based on Aristotle of little value.

In 1608 he became tutor to William Cavendish, the son of a wealthy nobleman who later became Earl of Devonshire. His connection with the Cavendish family lasted, with interruptions, for the rest of his life, and gave him access to libraries, travel and powerful patrons. In the 1620s he worked for a time as a secretary to Francis Bacon, translating some of his essays into Latin.

Hobbes's first published work was an English translation of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War (1629), which he valued as a lesson in the dangers of democracy and faction. Around the same time, according to his friend John Aubrey, he came across a copy of Euclid open at a geometrical proof and was captivated by the way geometry moved from simple definitions to certain conclusions. He wanted to build a science of politics in the same way.

On tours of the continent with his pupils he met leading scientists. In Florence in 1636 he visited Galileo Galilei, whose science of motion impressed him deeply, and in Paris he joined the circle of the friar Marin Mersenne. He came to believe that everything in the world, including human thought and feeling, could be explained as matter in motion.

In 1640, as conflict grew between Charles I and Parliament, Hobbes circulated The Elements of Law, a defence of royal authority. Fearing for his safety, he fled to Paris that November, where he stayed for eleven years. He wrote objections to the Meditations of René Descartes, which were printed with the book in 1641, and the two men disliked each other. In 1642 he published De Cive, on the citizen, and from 1646 he taught mathematics to the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. Meanwhile the civil war in England led to the execution of Charles I in 1649.

Leviathan was published in London in 1651. Hobbes begins with human nature. People are roughly equal in strength and cunning, they desire their own preservation, and they compete for scarce goods, fear one another and seek glory. In a "state of nature", without any common power to keep them in awe, they would live in constant insecurity. There would be no farming, trade, arts or knowledge, and life would be, in his most famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Reason shows a way out. The laws of nature, which Hobbes defines as rational rules for self-preservation, tell people to seek peace and to give up their unlimited right to everything, provided others do the same. They do this by a covenant in which each agrees with every other to authorise one person or assembly to act for them all. This sovereign, the Leviathan of the title, a "mortal god", must hold undivided power over law, war, taxation and even public religion, because divided authority leads back to civil war. Subjects keep only a few rights, above all the right to defend their own lives, and their obligation lasts only as long as the sovereign can protect them.

Hobbes preferred monarchy, but his theory based authority on consent and self-interest rather than on divine right or tradition. Royalists distrusted this, and his long attack on the political power of the clergy, in the second half of the book, offended Anglicans and Catholics alike. Exiled royalists suspected him of making peace with the new Commonwealth, and he returned to England in the winter of 1651–52 and submitted to the government of the republic.

Hobbes completed his philosophical system with De Corpore (1655), on body, and De Homine (1658), on man. He held that the will is not free in the sense of being uncaused, and argued the point with Bishop John Bramhall. His attempt to square the circle drew him into a bitter, decades-long quarrel with the Oxford mathematician John Wallis, who showed his errors. After the restoration of Charles II in 1660 the king welcomed his old tutor and granted him a pension. In 1666, however, after the plague and the Great Fire of London, a parliamentary committee considered whether Leviathan was atheistic, and Hobbes was thereafter refused permission to publish on politics or religion in England. His history of the civil war, Behemoth, appeared only after his death.

He remained active into extreme old age, translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse in his mid-eighties. He died at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, a Cavendish house, on 4 December 1679, aged 91.

Leviathan provoked many replies in the decades after its publication, and "Hobbist" became a term of abuse for atheists and libertines. Yet his approach, starting from individuals and asking why they should obey, set the terms for social contract theory. John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau both built their own versions of the contract partly in response to him, with very different conclusions. Baruch Spinoza drew on his political ideas, and his materialism and critique of the Bible anticipated later radical thinkers. Modern scholars read him as a central figure of early modern philosophy, and game theorists still use his state of nature as a model of the problem of cooperation. His life belongs to the turbulent seventeenth-century Kingdom of England, part of the wider history of the United Kingdom.