Early modern Europe · 1588–1679
Thomas Hobbes
English materialist who grounded the state in fear and consent
Without a common power, life would be a war of all against all — “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Rational people would therefore authorise an absolute sovereign to keep the peace.
Life and thought
Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada; he later wrote that his mother gave birth to twins, himself and fear. After Oxford he spent most of his life as tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, travelling in Europe, meeting Galileo and falling in love with geometry. As the English Civil War approached, his royalist sympathies sent him into exile in Paris from 1640 to 1651, where he wrote Leviathan.
Hobbes was a thoroughgoing materialist: everything, thought included, is matter in motion. His politics starts from an imagined state of nature without government. Because people are roughly equal and compete for gain, safety and glory, each has reason to fear the others, and life there is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Reason therefore advises everyone to give up their right to all things and authorise one sovereign strong enough to keep the peace; even a bad sovereign is better than civil war. Locke, Rousseau and Rawls kept his method of imagining a contract while rejecting his absolutism.