The English political philosopher whose Leviathan derived absolute sovereign authority from the rational choice of individuals fleeing the war of all against all, founding the social-contract tradition that would run through Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls.
hobbes
English philosopher (1588–1679) whose Leviathan grounded political authority in the rational consent of self-interested individuals, established the modern social-contract tradition, and provided the most rigorous early-modern statement of materialist metaphysics in English.
Life
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 in Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, prematurely — his mother went into labour, by his later autobiographical account in Latin verse, on hearing news of the approaching Spanish Armada. He grew up, he wrote, twinned with fear. His father, an undistinguished vicar, abandoned the family after a brawl with a fellow cleric; a prosperous uncle financed Thomas's education.
Hobbes entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1603, completed his B.A. in 1608, and immediately took employment as tutor to William Cavendish, later second Earl of Devonshire — the beginning of a sixty-year association with the Cavendish family that would shape his life. Through the Cavendishes he travelled three times on the Continent (1610, 1629–31, 1634–37), meeting in the course of these journeys Galileo at Arcetri in 1636, Marin Mersenne and the circle of mathematicians and natural philosophers around him in Paris, and Pierre Gassendi.
The second and third tours awakened Hobbes's philosophical ambition. The encounter with Euclid — he came across the Elements by chance in a gentleman's library, opened to the Pythagorean theorem, found the proposition implausible, traced the demonstration backward, and was, by John Aubrey's report, "in love with geometry" thereafter — fixed for him the standard to which philosophy must aspire. The geometric method, ascending from definitions and axioms to demonstrated theorems, became the model for his ambitious Elementa Philosophiae: a three-part system covering body (De Corpore), man (De Homine), and citizen (De Cive).
The English political crisis intervened. With the calling of the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640, Hobbes — having circulated his Elements of Law, Natural and Politic in manuscript that defended royal sovereignty — fled to Paris in November 1640, fearing for his safety. He remained in Paris through the Civil War years, serving as mathematics tutor to the future Charles II from 1646. In Paris he completed De Cive (1642), published an enlarged edition in 1647, and composed his masterpiece, Leviathan, which appeared in London in 1651.
The publication of Leviathan ended Hobbes's Paris welcome. The French clergy were scandalized by the work's Erastian theology and biblical interpretation; the English exiles suspected the work of accommodating to Cromwell's regime. Hobbes returned to England, made his peace with the Commonwealth, and after the Restoration was received at court by Charles II, who gave him a pension. His later life was occupied by acrimonious disputes — with the Oxford mathematician John Wallis over Hobbes's failed circle-squaring, with Bishop Bramhall over free will, with the Royal Society which never elected him — and by the production of further works: De Corpore (1655), De Homine (1658), the Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (composed c. 1666–70), and the autobiographical Vita in Latin verse. He died on 4 December 1679, aged 91.
The Materialist Metaphysics
Hobbes's philosophical system rests on a thoroughgoing materialism. "The universe," he writes in Leviathan IV.46, "that is, the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body... and that which is not body is no part of the universe." Whatever is real is body in motion; whatever cannot be described in terms of bodies in motion either does not exist or is mere word.
Sensation is the motion of external bodies pressing on sense organs, propagated inward to the brain and heart. Imagination is decaying sensation. Memory and dreams are imagination from earlier impressions. Reasoning is the addition and subtraction of names. There is no immaterial soul, no incorporeal substance, no occult quality. The ambitious program is to derive the human and political world from the physics of bodies in motion — to show, against the Scholastic tradition Hobbes despised, that natural philosophy alone suffices.
The nominalism is severe. Universals do not exist; what exists are individual bodies, and the universal name signifies merely that many particular things have been called by the same name. Truth is a property of propositions, not things; it consists in the right ordering of names. The famous nominalist line: "True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood" (Leviathan I.4).
The State of Nature and the Social Contract
The political theory begins from a thought-experiment about what life would be without political authority. In the state of nature, all are roughly equal in physical and mental power — the weakest can kill the strongest by stealth or confederation. From rough equality follows equal hope in attaining ends. From equal hope follows competition, since the same scarce resources are sought. From competition follow three principal causes of quarrel: competition for gain, diffidence (fear) for safety, and glory for reputation.
"In such condition," Hobbes writes in the most quoted passage of Leviathan (I.13), "there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain... no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
The state of nature is not necessarily a historical period — Hobbes acknowledges that it has perhaps never existed in its pure form anywhere but among American natives and in the relations of sovereigns themselves — but a logical reconstruction of what life would be in the absence of common power. Reason, calculating the hopelessness of this condition, discovers the laws of nature (Leviathan I.14–15): nineteen precepts of which the first three are the foundational ones — seek peace, lay down one's right to all things on the condition that others do likewise, and perform covenants made.
The laws of nature, however, bind only in foro interno — in conscience, in willingness — not in foro externo, in action. Without enforcement, the laws of nature provide no safety. They become effective only when each person transfers his right of self-defense to a sovereign authority that holds the sword: that has the power to enforce covenants and punish violations. This transfer constitutes the commonwealth — the Leviathan of the title, the great artificial person whose will is the will of the multitude organized.
Sovereignty
Hobbes's sovereign is absolute. The sovereign cannot be guilty of injustice to subjects, because subjects have authorized all his acts. The sovereign judges what is necessary for peace, what doctrines may be taught, who shall hold office, when war shall be made. The sovereign may be a single person (monarchy), an assembly of some (aristocracy), or the whole people (democracy) — Hobbes prefers monarchy as least conflicted in will, but the absoluteness of sovereignty is independent of its form.
The right of resistance is narrowly limited: subjects retain only the right to refuse to kill themselves, to incriminate themselves, or to participate in their own destruction. They retain no right to judge the sovereign's policies, no right to rebel for tyranny, no right to balance one branch of government against another. The reason: any limitation on sovereignty creates a higher authority to settle the dispute, and that higher authority is the real sovereign.
This absolutism is what shocked Hobbes's contemporaries and continues to define the Hobbesian position. But the absolutism rests on the consent of those who covenant: the sovereign's authority derives from the rational decision of free individuals seeking their own preservation. The Hobbesian state is not the patriarchal authority of Robert Filmer or the divine-right monarchy of James I; it is a construction of individual consent in service of individual interest — the first thoroughly modern, secular justification of political authority.
Religion and the Christian Commonwealth
The second half of Leviathan — books III (Of a Christian Commonwealth) and IV (Of the Kingdom of Darkness) — applies the political theory to the religious situation. Hobbes argues, on biblical grounds, that the civil sovereign is also the supreme head of the church in his territory — a strong Erastian position. The interpretation of scripture, the determination of doctrine, the appointment of clergy, the regulation of worship: all belong to the civil sovereign. Private judgment in religion has the same disruptive effects as private judgment in politics; both must be subordinated to the sovereign's determination.
The biblical interpretation that supports this conclusion is selective and provocative. Hobbes argues that the soul is mortal (only resurrected at the Last Judgment), that hell is not eternal torment but eventual second death, that the kingdom of God is a future earthly kingdom rather than a present spiritual one, and that the apostolic succession of bishops is no scriptural doctrine. The fourth book — the Kingdom of Darkness — is a sustained attack on the Roman Catholic Church and on the Scholastic tradition, which Hobbes accuses of using "insignificant speech" (i.e., metaphysical jargon) to enslave the minds of Christians and usurp the authority of civil sovereigns.
This material made Hobbes the object of suspicion of atheism from his contemporaries onward. Modern scholarship is divided: A. P. Martinich (The Two Gods of Leviathan, Cambridge University Press, 1992) argues for the sincerity of Hobbes's Christianity; Edwin Curley and others have read Hobbes as covertly anti-religious. The dispute will not be settled.
Reception
Hobbes's reception was sharply divided. The Anglican establishment treated Leviathan as a heretical and dangerous book — attempts to ban or burn it surfaced repeatedly through the 1660s and 1680s. Yet the work could not be ignored. John Locke, who never cites Hobbes by name in the Two Treatises of Government, builds his political theory in implicit opposition to Hobbes: a state of nature governed by natural law accessible to reason, a more limited transfer of rights to government, a right of revolution against tyranny. Spinoza absorbs Hobbes's political naturalism while rejecting the absolutism. Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and the entire social-contract tradition take Hobbes as the founding move to be answered or developed.
The twentieth-century revival of Hobbes scholarship — by Michael Oakeshott, Howard Warrender, C. B. Macpherson, Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck, Kinch Hoekstra, Noel Malcolm, and Susanne Sreedhar — has produced critical editions, contextual studies, and reinterpretations that increasingly treat Hobbes as one of the deepest political thinkers in the Western tradition. Malcolm's three-volume edition of Leviathan for the Clarendon Hobbes (Oxford University Press, 2012) is the current standard. Skinner's Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Tuck's The Sleeping Sovereign (Cambridge University Press, 2015) are central to recent debate.
Significance
Hobbes's importance is fourfold. As a metaphysician, he produced the most rigorous early-modern materialism in English and one of the most thoroughgoing nominalisms in any language. As a political theorist, he created the social-contract framework within which modern political philosophy still operates. As a critic of Scholastic and clerical authority, he helped clear the conceptual ground on which secular politics could be argued. And as a stylist, the prose of Leviathan — austere, sardonic, organized by the demonstrative method but written with the rhetorical force of a polemicist — is one of the lasting monuments of English philosophical writing.