Thomas Hobbes was born in Malmsbury, England,
in 1588. As he noted in his autobiography, he was “born a twin of
fear” because his mother went into premature labor out of fear that
the Spanish Armada was about to attack England. Although the theme
of fear and its overwhelming power would recur in his later work,
Hobbes’s early years were largely free of anxiety. He was educated
in England’s finest schools under the tutelage and patronage of
some of its most prominent noblemen and intellectuals.
Hobbes lived through a tumultuous period in English history, and
his most productive years as a philosopher coincided with a time
of political turmoil and civil war. Early in the 1640s, when it became
clear that Parliament was going to turn on King Charles I, Hobbes
fled to France. As a devoted monarchist, Hobbes feared persecution
if he stayed in an England run by Parliamentarians. He stayed in
France for eleven years, during which he produced much of his most
important writing. Hobbes’s most famous work, Leviathan,
was published in 1651, two years after Charles I had been executed
by the administrators of the Long Parliament, the leaders of the
first nonmonarchial government in English history. Although Leviathan won
him a new notoriety, at the time of its publication Hobbes’s political
philosophy was already well known in Parliamentary circles, where
he was generally vilified.
Throughout his professional life, Hobbes was more often derided
than celebrated by his contemporaries. In England, his works were
banned repeatedly, and “anti-Hobbism” reached such a peak in 1666
that his books were burned at his alma mater, Oxford. Because of
his materialist philosophy and his opposition to the established
church, Hobbes was often labeled an atheist, though he never professed
to be one.
Hobbes was a supremely individual thinker. He attempted through
his writing to influence the political conflicts of his day, but he
managed to alienate himself even from those who might have been
inclined to side with him. During the civil war, he chose not to tone
down his rhetoric favoring absolutist monarchy as did many other
royalists. At a moment when everyone on the king’s side was at pains
to proclaim their support for the Church of England, he trumpeted
his distaste for the clergy. These indiscretions caused Hobbes to
be banned from the court of King Charles when he was perhaps the
most prominent royalist intellectual of the day. He also differentiated
himself from his royalist cohorts by claiming that the king’s right
to rule came not from a divine right granted by God but from a social
contract granted by the people. This iconoclastic position has led
many to consider Hobbes to be among the first “liberal” political
thinkers in Europe—despite the disdain for his ideas held by liberal
philosophers, due to Hobbes’s authoritarian views.
Hobbes’s political philosophy was rooted in his fundamental conviction
that all of philosophy needed to be overhauled. Hobbes believed
that traditional philosophy had never been able to reach irrefutable
conclusions or secure universal truth and that this failure was
the cause not only of philosophical controversy but also of civil discord
and even civil war. Hobbes set out to create a philosophical system
that provided a secure and agreed-upon basis for all knowledge in
the universe. This totalizing philosophy, which Hobbes developed
over many years, was based in the materialist outlook that all phenomena
in the universe are traceable to the physical properties of matter
and motion. Hobbes, however, rejected the observation of nature
and the experimental method as legitimate bases for philosophical
knowledge. In this respect he diverged from his near-contemporary
Francis Bacon, who also proposed a total reform of philosophy, but
one based on the experimental method. Instead, Hobbes proposed a
purely deductive philosophy that bases its findings on previously
stated, universally agreed-upon “first principals.” Hobbes sought
to create a philosophy capable of explaining absolutely everything
that happens in the universe, and he produced original work that
cut across virtually every academic discipline. He engaged in lengthy
intellectual feuds (which he often lost) with figures as wide ranging
as the mathematician John Wallis, the philosopher René Descartes,
and the scientist Robert Boyle.
Hobbes is primarily remembered today as a political theorist, and
he has been enormously influential in political theory. The most durable
components of his philosophy have been his appraisal of the role
that power and fear play in human relations and his arresting portrait
of humans in the state of nature. Political and ethical philosophers
of all kinds have had to confront his theories.
Hobbes remained an incredibly prolific writer into old
age, undeterred by widespread opposition to his work. He lived to
the age of eighty-nine during an era when the average life expectancy
was not much older than forty. Keeping busy to the end, in his eighties
Hobbes produced new English translations of both the Iliad and
the Odyssey and penned an autobiography in Latin
verse. Despite the controversy he caused, he was something of an
institution in England by the end of his life. As abhorrent or attractive
as his views may be to readers, his brilliantly articulated theories
are read by people across the political spectrum. Hobbes’s ideas
may be embraced or rejected, but they are never ignored.
