Thomas Hobbes

English philosopher (1588–1679), born prematurely in Westport — a fact he himself wryly attributed to the terror his mother felt upon learning of the approach of the Spanish Armada — educated at Oxford and later tutor and secretary to the aristocratic Cavendish family, an occupation that allowed him to travel across Europe and come into contact with figures such as Galileo and Descartes, and who developed, during the turbulent decades of the English Civil War, one of the most influential and controversial political theories of modernity, grounded in a rigorous philosophical materialism that reduced even mental processes to physical motion. His masterwork, Leviathan (1651), written largely during his exile in Paris fleeing the English conflicts, begins from a pessimistic description of the hypothetical state of nature preceding all organised society as a condition of 'war of all against all' (bellum omnium contra omnes), in which, absent a common authority to impose order, human life is, in his most famous formulation, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. To escape this untenable condition, Hobbes argues that rational individuals agree through a social contract to surrender all their natural rights — except the basic right to self-preservation — to an absolute sovereign, whether a monarch or an assembly, whose sole function is to guarantee peace and security, and whose authority, once instituted, cannot legitimately be resisted or divided without provoking a return to the original chaos. This defence of absolute political power, grounded not in divine right but in the rational consent of subjects, marked a radical break with traditional political theories and scandalised both partisans of divine-right absolute monarchy and republicans alike, being temporarily banned at Oxford and its author accused of atheism, although Hobbes never formally renounced the Christian faith. His influence on later political philosophy, both on thinkers who shared his pessimistic view of human nature and on those who refuted it, has been decisive to this day.

5 works

• Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament
• De Cive
• Human Nature, De Corpore Politico (The Elements of Law) and Of Liberty and Necessity
• Leviathan
• The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume 03 (of 11)