Thomas Hobbes

Biography

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was born in Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, at a moment his contemporaries regarded as ominous: his mother, he later joked, gave birth to twins, himself and fear, because the news of the approaching Spanish Armada had frightened her into early labor. His father, a somewhat disreputable clergyman, abandoned the family, and Thomas was raised and educated through the intervention of a prosperous uncle. He studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he acquired a lasting distaste for the scholastic Aristotelianism that dominated the curriculum. After leaving the university he became tutor to the Cavendish family, a connection that gave him access to one of the great private libraries of England and introduced him to a widening circle of intellectual and political life.

Through the Cavendishes, Hobbes travelled repeatedly to the continent, where he met Galileo, Marin Mersenne, and (on several visits to Paris) René Descartes, whose Meditations he was among the first to read and criticize. His conversion to the new mechanical philosophy, the vision of nature as matter in motion governed by causal law, dates from these encounters and from his study of Euclidean geometry, whose deductive method he took as a model for rigorous reasoning. He wrote on optics, on the body, on human nature, and on the citizen, but it was the catastrophe of civil war that drew him into political philosophy. Fearing for his life as the conflict between King and Parliament deepened, he fled to France in 1640 and remained in exile for eleven years. There he composed Leviathan, published in 1651. He returned to England later that year, lived to be ninety-one, and continued writing and disputing until his death.

Historical Background

Hobbes's political philosophy is inseparable from the English Civil War, the prolonged conflict that pitted Charles I against Parliament, culminating in the King's execution in 1649 and the establishment of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Hobbes had watched the country he knew dissolve into armed faction, and he attributed the catastrophe not to the wickedness of particular men but to a failure of political understanding. Both sides claimed to defend rights, conscience, and ancient constitution, and each appeal to a higher authority against the sovereign had, in his view, licensed rebellion. The lesson he drew was that political theory had to provide a single, unambiguous account of the source and limits of obligation, lest the multiplication of competing authorities dissolve the commonwealth into the war of all against all.

The intellectual background was the Scientific Revolution. Galileo's mechanics suggested that all natural phenomena could be explained by the motion of bodies, and Hobbes extended this vision to human beings and their societies. If man is a body in motion, driven by appetites and aversions, then the state is an artificial body that can be understood by the same principles. He rejected the scholastic appeal to essences, final causes, and a hierarchy of natural purposes, and he treated the commonwealth as an artifact, a machine designed for a purpose, namely the preservation of the lives of those who compose it. The Stanford Encyclopedia emphasizes that Hobbes was the first major thinker to apply the new scientific method systematically to politics, and that this ambition, no less than his conclusions, set the agenda for modern political philosophy.

Core Ideas

The State of Nature

Hobbes's argument begins from a thought experiment about human beings considered apart from any government. In the state of nature there is no common power to keep men in awe, and therefore no law and, in his striking phrase, no injustice. Human beings are roughly equal in body and mind: even the weakest can kill the strongest by cunning or alliance, and no one is so strong as to be secure against all others. Equality of ability produces equality of hope in attaining one's ends. When two desire the same thing that they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies, and the competition for scarce goods, together with diffidence, the fear of being preempted, and the desire for reputation or glory, drives them into conflict.

The result is the condition Hobbes famously described as the war of every man against every man, a condition not of constant fighting but of a known disposition toward it, like foul weather. In such a state there is no industry, agriculture, navigation, trade, letters, or society, because the fruits of labor cannot be secured, and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes does not claim that human beings are naturally vicious; he claims that even reasonable people, placed in a situation without common authority, are driven by fear and self-preservation into mutual threat. The Internet Encyclopedia notes that the state of nature functions as an analytical device, isolating the problem that political authority exists to solve, rather than as a historical account of an actual pre-political epoch.

The Social Contract

The escape from this condition lies in the laws of nature, which Hobbes presents as rational precepts discovered by reflection on self-preservation. The first and fundamental law is to seek peace and follow it, and when peace cannot be obtained, to use all means of war in self-defense. The second law, which follows from the first, is that a person should be willing, when others are also, to lay down the right to all things and be contented with as much liberty against others as one would allow others against oneself. This mutual laying down of rights is the social contract. Each individual agrees with every other to transfer their natural right of self-government to a single authority, on condition that the others do the same.

Crucially, the contract is among the individuals themselves, not between them and the sovereign. The sovereign is created by this act of authorization but is not a party to it, and therefore cannot breach it. This construction allows Hobbes to generate an absolute authority out of the consent of equals without limiting that authority by the terms of a bargain. The sovereign, once authorized, holds the power to make laws, judge controversies, make war and peace, and regulate the economy, all for the end for which it was instituted, the preservation of the lives of the subjects. The Stanford Encyclopedia observes that Hobbes's contract is unusual in producing a sovereign who stands above the very agreement that creates it, a feature that has drawn both the admiration and the criticism of later contractarians.

Absolute Sovereignty

The conclusion Hobbes draws is that sovereignty must be absolute and indivisible. A divided sovereignty, whether between King and Parliament, or between civil and ecclesiastical authority, is for him a recipe for civil war, since each part can claim supremacy and appeal to the people against the other. The sovereign may be a single person, an assembly of few, or an assembly of many, and Hobbes classifies the resulting commonwealths as monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; but in each case the sovereign power is, by definition, unlimited. The sovereign cannot act unjustly toward the subjects, because injustice is breach of covenant, and the sovereign is party to no covenant.

This absolutism is not tyranny in the ordinary sense. Hobbes insists that the sovereign rules legitimately only for the preservation of the subjects, and that a sovereign who fails in this fundamental duty forfeits the purpose of its institution. The subject retains the inalienable right to resist when the sovereign directly threatens his life, since the whole point of authorization was self-preservation, and no one can be understood to have agreed to his own destruction. Yet within these limits the sovereign's word is law, and disobedience, even in matters of conscience, is unjust. The debate about whether this makes Hobbes a theorist of tyranny or of rational security has never been settled. The Stanford Encyclopedia suggests that the enduring question he poses is whether the avoidance of civil war requires the concentration of unlimited power, or whether divided and limited government can secure peace without sacrificing liberty.

Materialism and Mechanism

Underlying Hobbes's politics is a comprehensive materialist and mechanist philosophy. Everything that exists is body, and every event is the motion of body. Mind, thought, and sensation are motions within the perceiver, caused by the pressure of external bodies on the senses. There are no immaterial souls, no separate forms or essences, and Hobbes was prepared to draw the dangerous conclusion that even God, insofar as he can be spoken of philosophically, must be conceived as a very subtle body. This materialism underwrites his political theory in two ways. It provides a unified account of human nature, in which appetite, aversion, deliberation, and will are all reducible to motions toward and away from objects, and it dissolves the authority of any claim, whether scholastic, ecclesiastical, or natural law, that rests on purposes or essences intrinsic to things rather than on the motions and interests of human beings.

Hobbes's mechanism also shaped his theory of knowledge. He admired the deductive clarity of geometry and sought to reconstruct political science on comparable foundations, beginning from definitions and proceeding by rigorous inference. He was less successful in ethics than in geometry, and his attempts to derive moral and political conclusions from definitions of appetite and aversion have struck many readers as question-begging. But his insistence that moral and political claims be framed in terms of human passions and interests, and his refusal to ground them in a teleological order of nature, opened the path that later empiricist and contractarian theories would follow.

Major Works

Hobbes's major works form a connected system of body, man, and citizen. De Cive (1642, expanded 1647), the political portion of the system, was the first to appear and established his contractarian theory. Leviathan (1651), his masterpiece, restates and deepens the argument in English and adds the celebrated analysis of religion and the kingdom of darkness. De Corpore (1655) sets out his materialist metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics, and De Homine (1658) treats the human being, including optics and the passions. The Elements of Law (composed 1640, published posthumously) is an early draft of his political theory. His translation of Thucydides' History (1629), his critical Objections to Descartes' Meditations (1641), and his late Behemoth (written 1668, published 1679), a history of the Civil War, round out the corpus. Leviathan remains the indispensable work, the book in which Hobbes's psychology, materialism, and political theory converge.

Philosophical Influence

Hobbes's influence on political philosophy is difficult to overstate. He is commonly regarded as the founder of modern social contract theory, the first thinker to derive political authority from the consent and interests of individuals rather than from divine ordinance, natural hierarchy, or ancient custom. Every later contractarian, whether in agreement or opposition, defines a position in relation to him. John Locke accepted the contractarian framework but drew from it a theory of limited government, natural rights, and the right of revolution that was almost the mirror image of Hobbes's absolutism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau transformed the contract into the expression of a collective general will. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that the very terms in which the modern tradition debates political obligation, consent, rights, and the limits of authority were largely set by Hobbes's intervention.

His influence extends beyond contractarianism proper. The materialism and mechanism he championed fed into the later empiricist tradition and into the naturalistic accounts of human nature developed by the Enlightenment. His psychological egoism, the thesis that all voluntary action is ultimately directed to the agent's own good, remains a standing challenge to moral theory. At the same time, his absolutism made him a permanent reference point in debates about the proper scope of state power, invoked alike by theorists of strong authority and by liberals who define their position against him. The Internet Encyclopedia observes that Hobbes's achievement was to make politics a science of human artifice, to show that the state is something we make and can therefore remake, a conviction that, however much later thinkers rejected his conclusions, they could not put aside.

Related Concepts

Hobbes's philosophy is defined by the questions of Power and Justice that his state of nature forces into view. His social contract inaugurates the tradition of Social Contract Theory, against which later thinkers defined themselves: John Locke inverted his absolutism into limited government and natural rights, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau recast the contract as the formation of a collective sovereign. His materialism places him in dialogue with Spinoza, whose own metaphysics of one substance offers a different route to naturalism. The trade he draws between Freedom and security, and his skeptical treatment of inherited Rights, remain central to debates about the nature and limits of political authority. These themes converge in Leviathan, the work in which Hobbes's whole system is most fully realized.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Thomas Hobbes."
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy."
3. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy."