Thomas Hobbes

Key ideas

In Leviathan Hobbes imagines a state of nature with no government. Equal in their ability to harm each other and competing for scarce goods, people would live in constant fear of violent death. Reason therefore leads them to a social contract: everyone gives up the right to do as they please to a sovereign strong enough to keep the peace. Modern contract theories, including John Rawls's the veil of ignorance, descend from this idea.

Hobbes was a thoroughgoing materialist: everything, including the mind, is matter in motion. He was also an early compatibilist. A free agent is one who is not prevented from doing what he wills; that the will itself has causes does not make the action unfree. His public dispute with Bishop Bramhall over this question is one of the first great free will debates in English.

He also added a twist to the Ship of Theseus: if someone collected all the discarded planks and rebuilt the original ship, which of the two ships would be the real one?

“And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13 (1651)

Life, briefly

Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada; he later said that his mother gave birth to twins, himself and fear. He worked for most of his life as tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, travelled widely in Europe, and met Galileo.

He fled to Paris during the English Civil War and wrote Leviathan there. He returned to England, lived to ninety-one, and was translating Homer in his eighties.

Major works

• Leviathan (1651)
• De Cive (1642)
• De Corpore (1655)
• Of Liberty and Necessity (1654)

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Thomas Hobbes
• WikipediaThomas Hobbes