Who was Thomas Hobbes?
Thomas Hobbes went to Oxford and then spent much of his life as tutor and secretary in the Cavendish household. He supported the king, and in late 1640, as conflict loomed, he left England for Paris. He stayed there until 1651, through the years of civil war. His political books, among them The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, begin with a mechanical picture of human nature. From there he asks why free people would ever obey a ruler. His reply is a social contract: people hand their natural liberty to a sovereign whose power has to be single and almost unlimited, because shared power leads back to civil war.
Political views
- Pictured life without government as a war of everyone against everyone, where life is dangerous and short.Source: gutenberg.org
- Wrote that agreements without the sword behind them are just words, so peace needs a power strong enough to enforce them.Source: gutenberg.org
- Argued that subjects give the sovereign its authority through a covenant, and may not lawfully resist it except to save their own lives.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Held that power must not be shared out among king, parliament and church, since that split had caused the civil war.Source: iep.utm.edu
- Put the church below the sovereign, who decides which teachings may be given in public.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Said that people who cannot support themselves should be cared for under the laws of the commonwealth, not left to private charity.Source: gutenberg.org
- Saw separate states as still in a state of nature with one another, because no common power sits above them.Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
Hobbes is often called a founder of modern social contract theory and of the view that political power rests on the interests and consent of individuals, not on divine right. In his own day royalists distrusted him for resting sovereignty on consent, and clergy attacked him as a materialist and a suspected atheist. Later liberals dropped his absolutism but kept his starting point in the individual. International relations realists use his picture of anarchy among states. Critics say he took too dark a view of human nature and made too strong a case for power with no check on it.
In their own words
“And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”