Hobbes, Thomas

Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) An English philosopher and social theorist of the Enlightenment. Hobbes's most influential writings in political philosophy span the period of the English Civil War, and are widely interpreted as an intellectual response to the experience of political instability and personal insecurity. His major work Leviathan (1651) offered a justification for absolute political authority which purported to be a deduction from human nature. Hobbes's account of human nature was an extraordinarily thoroughgoing and ingenious extension of the science of mechanics (as learned from Galileo). According to Hobbes, the whole range of human psychological attributes—sense-perception, memory, imagination, thought, speech, and the passions—were effects of the motions of the minute particles of matter of which we, like other material bodies, are composed. On this view of our nature, action is governed by the passions, which are in turn classified as ‘aversions’ and ‘appetites’. These passions are the basis of moral judgement, and issue in actions whose tendency is self-preservation.

In Hobbes's view, then, human action is governed by the twin passions of fear of death and desire for power. If we imagine humans living in a ‘state of nature’ prior to the establishment of any law or political power to keep them ‘in awe’, each individual, lacking any reason for expecting goodwill from the others, will be caught up in a restless pursuit of ever more power. In such a situation, the desire for security on the part of each individual must issue in perpetual antagonism and instability, a state in which (to use Hobbes's famous phrase) life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. But humans are possessed of rationality and foresight (capacities which Hobbes characteristically accounts for in mechanical terms). They are thus able to recognize that their security would be better guaranteed by a voluntary act of giving over their individual powers to an individual or group who would thereby be established as a sovereign power over all of them. On Hobbes's bleak view of human nature, the sole function of government is to guarantee the security of the national citizen.

In his own day, Hobbes was able to make himself acceptable to Royalists and Parliamentarians alike. Subsequently, his materialistic view of human nature and political power has been praised by Marxists, whilst his view of humans as essentially self-interested and his authoritarian view of the minimal state have been popular with the political right. He was one of the earliest and most brilliant exponents of a naturalistic approach to social science. Hobbes's political philosophy remains influential in the study of international relations. See also SOCIAL CONTRACT.