Birth at Westport
He was born on 5 April near Malmesbury as the Spanish Armada threatened England; he later wrote that fear and he were born twins.
Social contract theory · mechanical philosophy · 1588–1679
Thomas Hobbes
Peace is not given by nature: it has to be built by covenant.
Malmesbury · Paris · Chatsworth
Biography
The thread of a life.
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher and humanist translator who spent most of his long life in the service of the Cavendish family and eleven years in exile in Paris during the civil wars. In The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan he argued that without a common power human beings fall into a war of every one against every one, and that reason directs them to authorize an undivided sovereign who keeps the peace. He also defended a mechanical account of nature, mind and language, and his views on religion made him one of the most attacked writers of his age.
Thucydides in English
His translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War, made directly from the Greek, was his first major publication.
Flight to France
After The Elements of Law had circulated in defence of royal power, he left for Paris when the Long Parliament met in November.
De Cive in Paris
The political part of his planned system was printed first, in a small private edition; an enlarged version appeared in Amsterdam in 1647.
Leviathan and return
Leviathan was published in London; that winter Hobbes left Paris and made his submission to the Council of State of the new Commonwealth.
Death at Hardwick Hall
He died on 4 December at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, aged 91, and was buried in the parish church of Ault Hucknall.
Understanding a life in depth
01Malmesbury, Oxford and the Cavendish household
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 at Westport, beside Malmesbury in Wiltshire; according to his Latin verse autobiography, his mother gave birth early on hearing of the approaching Spanish Armada, so that fear and he were born twins. His father, a curate of little learning, abandoned the family after a brawl, and a prosperous uncle paid for his schooling. Hobbes became an accomplished Latinist and Hellenist, studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and in 1608 became tutor to William Cavendish, the future second Earl of Devonshire. Service to the Cavendish family gave him a library, journeys on the Continent and access to political and learned circles for the rest of his life.
02Thucydides, Euclid and the new science
In 1629 Hobbes published an English translation of Thucydides made directly from the Greek, a history he valued for showing how eloquence and popular assemblies can ruin a city. Around the same time, according to his friend John Aubrey, he came upon Euclid’s Elements lying open in a gentleman’s library and was captivated by the way geometry reaches surprising conclusions step by step. On a journey through France and Italy in 1634–1636 he joined the circle of Marin Mersenne in Paris and visited Galileo near Florence. He then conceived a philosophy in three parts, on body, on man and on the citizen, in which every phenomenon would be explained by motion.
03Civil war and exile in Paris
In the spring of 1640 Hobbes completed The Elements of Law, which circulated in manuscript and defended an undivided sovereign power against those who wished to limit the king. When the Long Parliament met in November and began to impeach the king’s ministers, he left for Paris, later boasting that he had been the first of all who fled. In exile he wrote the third set of objections to Descartes’s Meditations, published De Cive in 1642 and, from 1646, taught mathematics to the future Charles II. After the execution of Charles I he wrote Leviathan, printed in London in 1651; its attack on clerical power and its account of submission to a new ruler alienated many royalists, and that winter he returned to England.
04Controversy, suspicion and old age
Back in London, Hobbes completed his system with De Corpore in 1655 and De Homine in 1658, while quarrelling in print with Bishop John Bramhall over free will and with the mathematician John Wallis over geometry. After the Restoration, Charles II welcomed his former tutor and granted him a pension, but in 1666 a committee of the House of Commons was empowered to examine Leviathan among books tending to atheism, and he was no longer allowed to publish on politics or religion in England. He wrote Behemoth, a dialogue on the causes of the civil wars, translated Homer in his eighties and died on 4 December 1679. In 1683 the University of Oxford condemned propositions drawn from his books and had them burned.
Hobbes gave modern political philosophy much of its basic vocabulary: state of nature, natural right, social contract, representation and sovereignty. Spinoza, Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau wrote in dialogue with him, often against him. His defence of absolute sovereignty still provokes debate, while his analysis of fear, trust and the conditions of cooperation is studied in law, political science and game theory.
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