Thomas Hobbes

Early Life and Education

Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely on April 5, 1588, in Westport (now part of Malmesbury), Wiltshire, England — his mother reportedly frightened into labor by news of the approaching Spanish Armada. Hobbes later quipped that 'fear and I were born twins.' His father was an impecunious and quarrelsome vicar who abandoned the family after a brawl at his church door; an uncle funded Hobbes's education.

He entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, at the age of fourteen, studying under the prevailing Aristotelian curriculum, which he came to despise. Graduating in 1608, he became tutor to William Cavendish, later the 2nd Earl of Devonshire — beginning a lifelong association with the Cavendish family that provided him with financial security, access to intellectual circles, and repeated opportunities for Continental travel.

Continental Encounters

Hobbes's three grand tours of the Continent (1610, 1629–1631, 1634–1637) were decisive for his intellectual development. On the third tour, he met Galileo in Florence and Marin Mersenne in Paris, entering the orbit of the most advanced scientific thought in Europe. It was reportedly while examining a copy of Euclid's Elements that Hobbes experienced his philosophical epiphany: the geometrical method of deducing truths from self-evident axioms could be applied to all knowledge, including the study of human beings and political society.

The English Civil War and Exile

As political tensions escalated in England during the late 1630s, Hobbes grew alarmed by parliamentarian challenges to royal authority. In 1640, he circulated The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic in manuscript, defending absolute sovereignty; fearing arrest after the Long Parliament convened, he fled to Paris — 'the first of all that fled,' as he put it.

During his eleven-year Parisian exile (1640–1651), Hobbes produced his philosophical system. De Cive (On the Citizen, 1642) presented his political philosophy in systematic form. Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651), his masterwork, integrated his materialism, his theory of human nature, and his political philosophy into a single grand argument.

Leviathan

Leviathan begins with a mechanistic psychology: human beings are material automata driven by desire and aversion. In the absence of political authority — the 'state of nature' — there is no morality, no property, no justice: only the war of every man against every man, where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Rational self-interest, particularly the fear of violent death, drives individuals to covenant with one another, surrendering their natural liberty to a sovereign (whether an individual or an assembly) who holds absolute, undivided power.

The sovereign's authority is not limited by divine right or natural law but derives entirely from the consent of the governed — yet once established, it is absolute and irrevocable (so long as the sovereign can maintain order). This bold synthesis of consent theory with absolutism scandalized both royalists (who disliked the contractual basis) and parliamentarians (who rejected the absolutist conclusion).

Return to England and Later Life

Hobbes returned to England in 1651 and made his peace with Cromwell's Commonwealth. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, he was granted a pension by the king, who enjoyed his company and wit. But Hobbes remained controversial: Parliament investigated Leviathan as a possibly blasphemous work after the Great Fire of London in 1666 (blamed by some on God's wrath at the nation's impiety). Hobbes was forbidden to publish on political or religious subjects in England, though he continued writing on mathematics, physics, and history.

He remained intellectually active into extreme old age, publishing a translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in his eighties. He died on December 4, 1679, at the age of 91, at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. His last words were reportedly: 'I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.'

Legacy

Hobbes is one of the most important political philosophers in the Western tradition. His social contract theory, his analysis of sovereignty, and his unflinching account of the state of nature established the conceptual framework within which Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and the entire tradition of liberal political philosophy operated — whether in agreement or opposition. His materialist metaphysics anticipated much of modern physicalism. His influence extends through political science, international relations theory, game theory, and the philosophy of law.