Hobbes: Life and Main Philosophical Ideas

Biographical Background

Thomas Hobbes lived from 1588 to 1679. He was born in England in the year of the Spanish Armada and later said that fear and he were born twins. He lived through intense political and religious conflict, including the English Civil War. These events shaped his concern with order, security, and sovereign authority.

Hobbes was influenced by the new mechanistic science. He sought to explain nature, human beings, and politics in terms of motion, desire, fear, and contract. His masterpiece Leviathan was published in 1651.

Philosophical Thought

Hobbes begins from a mechanistic materialism. Human beings are natural bodies moved by appetites, aversions, and passions. Political philosophy must therefore begin with human nature as it is, not as moralists imagine it to be.

His famous state of nature is a thought experiment. If there is no common authority, human beings are roughly equal in vulnerability and power to harm one another. Competition, distrust, and desire for reputation lead to conflict. Life in such a condition is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The laws of nature are rational rules for peace. People should seek peace, give up the unlimited right to all things when others do so too, and keep covenants. But covenants without enforcement are unreliable. Therefore, people authorize a sovereign power to maintain peace.

The sovereign, or Leviathan, must have sufficient authority to prevent civil war. Hobbes' sovereign may be a monarch, assembly, or other unified authority, but Hobbes prefers monarchy. Political obligation is grounded not in divine right but in rational self-preservation.

Hobbes does preserve a basic right of self-defense. No person can genuinely give up the right to resist direct threats to life.

Hobbes' importance lies in making the modern state an artificial solution to human insecurity. He transformed political legitimacy into a problem of individuals, rights, contract, sovereignty, and security.