Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was born in Malmesbury on April 5, 1588, the son of a poor minor clergyman who abandoned his family when Hobbes was sixteen. According to Hobbes, his mother went into labor when she heard that the Spanish Armada was approaching, so that, as he put it, “fear and I were born twins together.” This familiar tale indicates how Hobbes himself appreciated the central conjunction of mortal fear and human nature in his own thinking and in his life as well.
After excelling in classical languages and poetry as a youngster and studying at Oxford, Hobbes took a position in the household of William Lord Cavendish, the Earl of Devonshire. There and in similar positions throughout his life he served as secretary, tutor, and advisor. This was a common vocation for intellectuals in seventeenth-century England; John Locke was to play a similar role later in the century. From 1610 to 1615, Hobbes accompanied the Lord’s son on the Grand Tour of Europe; he returned to the Continent in 1634–36 with Cavendish’s grandson. On the early tour, Hobbes visited Venice and became acquainted with the tradition of classical rhetoric; later he would draw on this background as he considered the role of rhetoric in political argument. On the latter tour, he met the leading philosophers of the day, from Galileo to Pierre Gassendi and Marin Mersenne, who put him in touch with René Descartes, then in the Netherlands. By then Hobbes had already been captivated by the rigor of geometry, to which he added a fascination with the new science. During this period, then, Hobbes’s interests turned from classical literature to contemporary science and its applications, especially optics and ballistics. In 1629 he had produced his first publication, a translation of Thucydides, whom he revered for his sense of prudence and his sensitivity to the dangers of democracy. By the end of 1640 his scientific thinking had matured and joined with his political interests, resulting in a draft of a large, systematic work which he called the Elements of Law, Natural and Political. Among other things, the Elements is a work that grounded politics in a conception of natural law derived in part from the Dutch political theorist Hugo Grotius, whose great work The Laws of War and Peace had been published in 1625.
In 1640 Charles I was forced to call two Parliaments, and events occurred that eventually would lead to the English Civil War. Hobbes’s associations were with the King and his ministers, and hence, as tensions escalated, he feared for his life. In November he fled to France and remained there until 1651–52. In 1642 Hobbes published in Latin a reworked version of the political section of the Elements under the title De Cive (Of the Citizen), a work that was issued in England in an unauthorized translation in 1651, at about the same time that his first English and most famous work, Leviathan, appeared. The earlier sections of the Elements, De Corpore (Of Matter) and De Homine (Of Man), were not published until 1655 and 1658, respectively.
Leviathan has been influential far beyond the historical context of its writing and publication. In its first two parts Hobbes sketches his physics and psychology, outlines his famous account of the state of nature and its laws, develops his version of the social contract, and argues for an undivided sovereignty with all its functions, agencies, and prerogatives. These parts constitute one of the founding texts of modern moral and political theory.
But Leviathan does not end here. In parts three and four, Hobbes turns to issues of immediate historical concern. He attacks Roman Catholicism, Aristotelianism in the universities and in general intellectual culture, and the Anglican Church, while defending Erastianism, the doctrine of the political control of religion, and religious Independency, the movement that advocated the independence and control of individual congregations against the claims of a strong, central episcopacy. At the same time, Hobbes’s materialism, exhibited especially in part four, seemed to many to imply atheism. It is no wonder that, with the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes gained the reputation of a materialist and atheist and came to be known as the “beast of Malmesbury.”
With Leviathan’s publication in 1651, Hobbes returned to England and once again to the service of the Earl of Devonshire. For the remainder of his long life he played the role of a prominent intellectual and controversialist. In the 1650s he confronted John Wallis, an important Presbyterian and mathematician, on a variety of religious and scientific matters, and in the 1660s he debated Robert Boyle on issues of physics and experimentation. During the Restoration, moreover, Hobbes was the subject of severe criticism for his defense of Independency and his abandonment of the Anglicanism renewed under Charles II. His final years, the decades of the 1660s and 1670s, were years of threat and fear, as his religious opponents massed against him. But before they could overtake him, illness did; Hobbes died on December 3, 1679, having found, as he said, a hole whereby to leave the world.
Recommended Readings
Baumgold, Deborah. Hobbes’s Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Brown, K. C. (ed.). Hobbes Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Burns, James (ed.). Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Cranston, M., and R. S. Peters (eds.). Hobbes and Rousseau. Garden City: Doubleday, 1972.
Dietz, Mary G. (ed.). Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990.
Gauthier, David. The Logic of Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Goldsmith, M. M. Hobbes’s Science of Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
Hampton, Jean. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Hood, F. C. The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Johnston, David. The Rhetoric of Leviathan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Kavka, Gregory. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
McNeilly, F. S. The Anatomy of Leviathan. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Martinich, A. P. The Two Gods of Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Martinich, A. P. Thomas Hobbes. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Martinich, A. P. Hobbes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Oakeshott, Michael. Hobbes on Civil Association. Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1975.
Pocock, J.G.A. “Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics, Language, and Time. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
Rogers, G.A.J., and Alan Ryan (eds.). Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Skinner, Quentin. “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement. ed. G. E. Aylmer. London: Macmillan, 1974, 79–98.
Skinner, Quentin. “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Historical Journal 9 (1966), 286–317.
Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sommerville, Johann P. Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context. London: The Macmillan Press, 1992.
Sorell, T. Hobbes. London: Routledge, 1986.
Sorell, Tom (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
Strauss, Leo. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936.
Tuck, Richard. Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Tuck, Richard. Philosophy and Government 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Warrender, Richard. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Wolin, Sheldon. Politics and Vision. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1960.