A short life of the author
Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher whose masterwork, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651), is one of the foundational texts of Western political philosophy and one of the greatest works of English prose. Hobbes argued, with a logical rigour and a literary force that remain compelling after nearly four centuries, that human beings in a state of nature — without government, without law, without society — exist in a condition of perpetual conflict: “the war of all against all,” in which life is, in his most famous phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The only escape from this condition is the creation of an absolute sovereign — the “Leviathan” — to whom individuals surrender their natural liberty in exchange for peace, order, and protection.
Life
Hobbes was born in Westport, near Malmesbury, Wiltshire. His mother reportedly went into labour prematurely upon hearing news of the approaching Spanish Armada, and Hobbes later wrote that “fear and I were born twins.” He was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and became tutor to the Cavendish family, a position that gave him access to the libraries, conversations, and Continental travels that shaped his intellectual development.
He met Galileo in Florence, corresponded with Descartes, and developed his philosophical system over several decades of reading, travel, and reflection. During the English Civil War, he lived in exile in Paris (1640–1651), where he served as mathematics tutor to the future Charles II and where he wrote Leviathan.
The book’s publication made Hobbes one of the most controversial figures in English intellectual life. He was attacked by royalists (for his theory that sovereign authority derives from a social contract rather than from divine right), by parliamentarians (for his defence of absolute authority), and by the Church (for his materialist philosophy, which was widely regarded as atheistic). He was banned from publishing on political or religious subjects after the Restoration.
He lived to the remarkable age of ninety-one, writing, translating (he published a complete translation of Homer in his eighties), and engaging in intellectual disputes until the end of his life.
Leviathan (1651)
Leviathan is divided into four parts, though the first two — “Of Man” and “Of Commonwealth” — are the most important and most widely read.
The argument begins with Hobbes’s materialist psychology: human beings are essentially self-interested creatures driven by appetites and aversions. They are roughly equal in natural capacities (even the weakest can kill the strongest through guile or alliance), and this equality produces competition. In the state of nature — where there is no common power to keep them in awe — this competition leads inevitably to war.
The solution is the social contract: individuals agree to surrender their natural rights to a sovereign (whether a single person or an assembly) in exchange for the sovereign’s protection. The sovereign’s authority is absolute — it must be, because any limitation on sovereign power recreates the conditions for the war of all against all. The only right that individuals retain is the right of self-preservation: they cannot be obligated to kill themselves or to submit to death without resistance.
The book’s prose is magnificent — Hobbes writes with a clarity, force, and compressed energy that make Leviathan one of the great works of English literature as well as of philosophy.
Other Works
De Cive (On the Citizen, 1642) presents the argument of Leviathan in a more compressed Latin form and was widely read on the Continent. De Corpore (On the Body, 1655) and De Homine (On Man, 1658) complete Hobbes’s philosophical system, covering physics, physiology, and psychology. Behemoth, or The Long Parliament (written c. 1668, published 1681) is a history of the English Civil War that demonstrates Hobbes’s theory of political disintegration.
Influence and Legacy
Hobbes’s influence on subsequent political philosophy is incalculable. He established the framework within which all subsequent social contract theory operates — Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls are all responding to Hobbes, even when (especially when) they disagree with him. His materialist psychology anticipated modern behavioural science. His insistence that political authority is a human creation rather than a divine institution is the foundation of secular political thought.
He has been claimed by authoritarians and by liberals, by realists in international relations and by rational-choice theorists in economics. Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, saw Hobbes as the greatest political thinker; so did the liberal philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who wrote the introduction to the standard Blackwell edition of Leviathan (1946). The state of nature has entered ordinary language: to call a situation “Hobbesian” is universally understood as meaning a condition of lawless, violent competition.
Collecting Hobbes
Leviathan (1651, Andrew Crooke) in first edition is one of the great prizes of philosophical book collecting: copies bring $20,000–$100,000 depending on condition and the presence of the famous engraved title page by Abraham Bosse. De Cive (1642) brings $2,000–$8,000. Later editions and modern reprints are widely available.