Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) was an English philosopher widely regarded as a founder of modern political philosophy. His 1651 treatise Leviathan advanced an influential account of the social contract, arguing that legitimate government arises when individuals consent to a common authority in order to escape the violence of a lawless state of nature. [1] Alongside his political thought, he worked as a mathematician, historian, and translator of classical texts. [2]
Early life and education
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 in Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England. [1] He was educated at Oxford, where he studied at Magdalen Hall before graduating around 1608. Soon afterward he entered the service of the aristocratic Cavendish family as a tutor, a connection that endured for most of his life and gave him access to books, patronage, and travel on the European continent. [2]
Intellectual formation
As tutor and secretary to the Cavendishes, Hobbes made several journeys abroad, where he absorbed the new mathematics and the mechanical philosophy transforming European thought. He met leading figures of the age, including the astronomer Galileo, and came to embrace a thoroughgoing materialism, holding that all phenomena, human thought and sensation included, could ultimately be explained by matter in motion. [3] This mechanistic outlook underpinned his later work in geometry, optics, and political science.
Leviathan and political philosophy
Amid the turmoil of the English Civil War, Hobbes withdrew to Paris, where he spent more than a decade in exile. There, in 1651, he published Leviathan, his most celebrated work. He argued that in a "state of nature" lacking any common power, human life would be one of perpetual insecurity and conflict, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [1] To escape this condition, individuals covenant with one another to transfer their rights to a sovereign whose absolute authority secures peace, law, and order.
Later life and controversy
Hobbes eventually returned to England and made his peace with the new regime. His materialism and unorthodox treatment of religion drew persistent accusations of atheism and heresy. After the Restoration of 1660, King Charles II, whom Hobbes had tutored in mathematics during the exile, granted him a pension, yet clergy and Parliament remained hostile, and for a time he was barred from publishing on contentious subjects at home. [2] In his final years he turned back to classical scholarship, producing English verse translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. [1]
Legacy
Hobbes died on 4 December 1679 in Derbyshire, at a Cavendish estate. [1] His account of political obligation and the social contract profoundly shaped later philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who built upon and contested his ideas. He remains a foundational figure in modern political philosophy and in the tradition of social contract theory. [3]
