Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)

HOBBES, THOMAS (1588–1679)

HOBBES, THOMAS (1588–1679), English philosopher. Thomas Hobbes, perhaps the greatest of the English philosophers, was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, in 1588. The son of the disreputable vicar of Westport, he was raised by a wealthy uncle who saw to his education and his admission to Magdalen Hall, Oxford (B.A., 1608). After Oxford, Hobbes became tutor to the son of William Cavendish, the earl of Derbyshire, and remained attached to the Cavendish family throughout his life.

Hobbes's early association with Francis Bacon (1561–1626) strengthened what would become a lifelong dislike of Aristotelian philosophy that he had acquired at Oxford in opposition to his tutors. But he retained an interest in classical literature and published a translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in 1629 and a translation of Homer in quatrains in 1674–1675. Hobbes's discovery of geometry, his association with Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), and the friendship of Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) provided him with the analytic scheme and scientific method for which he had been searching to undergird a complete philosophy of nature and society. An association with the Great Tew circle (a group of men of letters who met at Great Tew, Lord Falkland's house north of Oxford) seems to have helped to move him from a humanistic and classical view of the world to one that was—in contrast to the appeals to the Bible that charged the outlooks of so many of his contemporaries—decidedly juridical and modern and drawn from the political crises that led to the English Civil War. His Elements of the Law, circulated in manuscript in 1640 and published in two parts in 1650, was the first statement of the darkly pessimistic view of human nature and call for undivided, absolute sovereignty for which he is known.

In late 1640—fearing for his life, he claimed, when the Long Parliament began its work—Hobbes fled to France, where he was welcomed by Mersenne's circle and where he served briefly as tutor to the Prince of Wales (the exiled and future King Charles II). In France, he enjoyed his most productive philosophic period, culminating in the publication of his masterpiece, Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, in 1651 shortly before he returned to England.

The aim of Leviathan, as announced in the Preface and in the Review and Conclusion, was to demonstrate, in the context of the recently concluded Civil War, the necessity of strong, overarching, unchallengeable government. The work was a distillation and an extension of Hobbes's quest for a comprehensive philosophy that moved from accounts of ultimate reality and human nature, through logic and reason, to a radically new understanding of politics that was also an attack on virtually all religious beliefs and practices. The political genius of Leviathan was its use of the emerging natural law, natural rights, and social contract theories and a radically individualistic conception of human nature in conjunction with the new science rather than the more conventional divine right doctrines to defend political absolutism. In one of the most memorable phrases in the history of political thought, Hobbes described life in the pre-political state of nature as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, ch. 13), the only remedy for which was the agreement to form a civil society with an absolute ruler at its head. For his efforts Hobbes was rewarded with the scorn of his contemporaries, especially for his apparent atheism, although the earliest critic of political theory, the divine right patriarchal royalist Sir Robert Filmer praised his conclusions while objecting to their foundations.

After the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes continued to work on his systematic philosophy and to attract critics. He enjoyed the patronage and probably the protection of the restored King Charles II, but he was attacked by Parliament after the Great Fire of 1666 and ultimately forbidden the right to publish. Nonetheless, he wrote Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, an account of English history during the period of the Civil War and Interregnum viewed from the perspective of his conceptions of human nature and politics, and an uncompleted Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Law, which offered a conception of law and sovereignty that is suggestive of the theories of J. L. Austin (1911–1960). Both works were published posthumously, in 1681 and 1682 respectively.

Hobbes's philosophic system, pointedly anti-Scholastic and anti-Aristotelian, was naturalistic and mechanistic; knowledge and understanding were rooted in experience. His metaphysics is often summarized as "matter in motion," and he was untroubled by some of the pressing problems of his day—and of subsequent philosophy—including accounting for the non-perceptual existence of phenomena and causation. Human beings, while capable of reason, are driven by their passions and motivated by fear, especially of one another. They are irreducibly self-interested and will cooperate only when they believe that it is to their advantage. All this was demonstrated by Hobbes's theory of the state of nature as altogether without institutions and relationships and as a condition in which everyone enjoyed an equal, natural freedom and had the natural right to all things and no corresponding obligations or duties, leading to the famous "war of every man against every man" (Leviathan, ch. 13)—hence, the description of life in that situation that was quoted above.

Although he believed that there was a law of nature, Hobbes's conception was altogether unlike the traditional view. His law of nature did not bind human actions in the absence of sufficient security, did not contain a body of moral and ethical principles, and was not truly the product of divine will. It was, however, discernable through reason, and its first principle was self-preservation. According to Hobbes, natural law commanded that people seek peace but only when others were willing to do so as well. It dictated that they agree to a social compact instituting an absolute sovereign who would maintain this conventionally established peace and to whom everyone was politically obligated because they had agreed to his rule because he "personated" them and their institutes, and because he had the legitimate power to punish their disobedience with death, which was their greatest fear. Although Hobbes believed that the establishment of a strong ruler would eventually lead to a less brutal and anxious life for the members of civil society, the psychology of the state of nature remained just beneath the surface of all human endeavors, kept in check by habits of forbearance maintained by fear of the sovereign.

Hobbes died in 1679 in the Cavendish home, Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, and was buried nearby. Witty to the end, he composed epitaphs for himself, his favorite of which was, "This is the true Philosopher's Stone." It was not used.

See also Aristotelianism ; Atheism ; Bacon, Francis ; Divine Right Kingship ; English Civil War and Interregnum ; Galileo Galilei ; Gassendi, Pierre ; Mathematics ; Mersenne, Marin ; Natural Law ; Philosophy ; Political Philosophy ; Scientific Method .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnston, David. The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation. Princeton, 1986.

Malcolm, Noel. Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford and New York, 2002.

Martinich, A. P. Hobbes: A Biography. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.

Rogers, G. A. J., and Alan Ryan, eds. Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes. Oxford and New York, 1988.

Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Gordon Schochet