Hobbes, Thomas 1588-1679
English political philosopher

He was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, prematurely, as he liked to explain, when his mother heard news of the approaching Spanish Armada. He was the son of a wayward country vicar, brought up by an uncle, and was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford (1603-08). He had numerous notable patrons, in particular the Cavendish family, the Earls of Devonshire, with whom he travelled widely as family tutor, thereby making the acquaintance of many leading intellectual figures of his day: Francis Bacon, John Selden and Ben Jonson in England, Galileo in Florence, and the circle of Marin Mersenne in Paris, including Ren� Descartes and Pierre Gassendi. But the first real intellectual turning-point of his life was his introduction at the age of 40 to Euclidean geometry, and he conceived the ambition of extending this compelling deductive certainty to a comprehensive science of man and society. His interest in political theory had already been indicated in his first published work, a translation of Thucydides's History (1629), and, becoming increasingly concerned with the civil disorders of the time, he wrote the Elements of Law Natural and Politic (completed in 1640 but not properly published until 1650), in which he attempted to set out in mathematical fashion the rules of a political science, and went on to argue in favour of monarchical government. When the Long Parliament assembled (1640) he quickly departed for France, to be followed by other Royalists who helped him to the position of tutor (1646) in mathematics to the exiled Prince of Wales (the future Charles II) in Paris. By then he had completed a set of 'Objections' (1641) to Descartes's Meditations, which Mersenne had commissioned from him (as from other scholars), and the De Cive (1642), a fuller statement of his new science of the state or 'civil philosophy'. His next work was his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), which presented and connected his mature thoughts on metaphysics, psychology and political philosophy. He was a thorough-going materialist, seeing the world as a mechanical system consisting wholly of bodies in motion, driven by the forces of attraction and repulsion, which could be seen also to govern human psychology and to determine what we call 'good' and 'evil'. Human beings are wholly selfish. Enlightened self-interest explains the nature and function of the sovereign state: we are forced to establish a social contract in which we surrender the right of aggression to an absolute ruler, whose commands are the law. The Leviathan offended the royal exiles in Paris and the French government by its hostility to Church power and religious obedience, and in 1652 Hobbes returned to England, made his peace with Cromwell and the Parliamentary regime, and settled in London. He continued to write and to arouse controversy. De Corpore appeared in 1655, De Homine in 1658. At the Restoration Charles II gave his old tutor a pension and helped quash a bill aimed at Hobbes, whose enemies in the clergy were claiming that the Plague and the Great Fire of London of 1665-66 revealed God's wrath against England for harbouring such an atheist. He was banned from publishing in England in 1666 and his later books were published in the Netherlands first. He wrote on tirelessly into his eighties, and amongst other things published Behemoth: a history of the causes of the Civil Wars of England (completed 1668, published 1682), an autobiography in Latin verse (1672), and verse translations of the Iliad (1675) and Odyssey (1676).

Bibliography: George C Richardson, Hobbes (2nd edn, 1967)