English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) dabbled in dozens of fields ranging from geometry to history. But he is best known today for writing the 1651 philosophical treatise Leviathan, a book that introduced the notion of the “social contract” and would have an enormous impact on the development of Western political philosophy.
The book, which Hobbes wrote shortly after the traumatic English civil war, argued that individuals voluntarily submit to a strong government in order to prevent anarchy. Without powerful rulers to uphold this social contract, Hobbes wrote, mankind would fall back into the chaos of the original “state of nature.” And life in the state of nature, he warned in a famous passage, would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s support for strong governments—and his generally gloomy view of human nature—was heavily influenced by the strife he witnessed in seventeenth-century England. The son of a disgraced ex-minister, Hobbes graduated from Oxford in 1608 and worked as a tutor for young noblemen, including the future King Charles II (1630–1685), for much of his life. He was an ardent royalist and was forced to flee to Paris at the outbreak of the English civil war, when the monarchy was temporarily overthrown.
Leviathan, published in Paris, outraged the French, and Hobbes was forced to return to England. (He avoided punishment for his royalist views by promising to stay out of politics.) He spent the rest of his life in England and regained influence after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
Controversy surrounding his works, however, flared anew in 1666, after the Great Fire of London. Many citizens blamed the fire on God’s wrath, which they believed had been incurred by English atheist writers. Because Hobbes believed that the state was a human, rather than divine, construct, he was included on the list of writers targeted for prosecution as heretics.
Hobbes managed to escape punishment and continued to publish—with several translations of Greek classics being among his works—until his death at age ninety-one. Many later political philosophers, especially John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), were influenced by his writings.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Leviathan takes its name from a mythical sea monster in the Bible. Hobbes used the beast as a metaphor for the state, which he believed was a powerful giant composed of numerous individuals.
- Hobbes’s forays into geometry were less successful than his philosophical career. In 1660, he announced that he had solved an ancient math problem, the duplication of the cube—but his solution was swiftly debunked.
- His last words were reportedly “A great leap in the dark.”
