Thomas Hobbes

About this figure

Thomas Hobbes was born in Malmesbury, England, in 1588, reportedly premature after his mother went into labor on hearing news of the approaching Spanish Armada. Educated at Oxford, he spent much of his career as a tutor and secretary to the aristocratic Cavendish family, which gave him access to extensive libraries and travel on the European continent, where he met figures such as Galileo and corresponded with other natural philosophers. Sympathetic to the royalist cause during the buildup to the English Civil War, he fled to Paris in 1640 and lived there in exile for over a decade, at one point serving as mathematics tutor to the future Charles II.

It was in Paris, amid the upheaval of civil war and regicide in England, that Hobbes wrote his major work, Leviathan, published in 1651. The book opens from materialist premises, treating human beings and their passions in mechanical terms, and argues that without a common power to keep people in awe, life in a "state of nature" would be a war of every man against every man, in which existence would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes's proposed solution was a social contract in which individuals surrender their natural rights to an absolute sovereign authority, the "Leviathan" of the title, in exchange for peace and security; the frontispiece's image of a crowned giant composed of many individual bodies remains one of the best-known images in political philosophy.

Leviathan's account of religion and its subordination of ecclesiastical to civil authority drew accusations of atheism and heresy from both royalist and parliamentarian critics, and Hobbes returned to England in 1651 only under an uneasy peace with the new government. He continued writing on mathematics, physics, and history into old age, engaging in a long and ultimately losing dispute with mathematicians over his claimed geometric proofs. He died in 1679 at the age of ninety-one, having outlived most of his critics.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.