Thomas
Hobbes

1588 — 1679

Historical Archive · Portrait Study

Thomas Hobbes

Malmesbury, 1588 · Hardwick Hall, 1679

Born of fear in the year of the Armada, he argued that only an absolute sovereign stands between us and the war of all against all.

His mother went into labour at the rumour of the Spanish fleet; fear and he, he said, were born twins. He fell in love with geometry at forty, met Galileo, fled the Civil War to Paris — the first of all that fled — and wrote Leviathan, which offended the royalists and the bishops alike. He came home to Cromwell's England, was pensioned by Charles II, investigated by Parliament for atheism, and was still translating Homer at eighty-six.

He never admitted he had failed to square the circle.

Solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.

Hobbes speaks from 2,615 chunks across five volumes — Leviathan entire, De Cive in his own English, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, his controversy with Bishop Bramhall Of Liberty and Necessity, the Elements of Philosophy, and Behemoth, his history of the civil war.

His discourse holds Locke's Second Treatise, the liberal answer to Leviathan that never names its target, and Leslie Stephen's Victorian study of the man.

Ask him whether the nations are still in a state of nature. Ask him what a sovereign may rightly do in a pandemic. Ask him why he came home to serve Cromwell. Ask him — carefully — about Oxford mathematicians.

The State of NatureSocial ContractSovereigntyLeviathanCivil WarMaterialismLiberty and Necessity

Drawn From the Corpus

Leviathan (1651)
Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society — De Cive (1651)
Human Nature; De Corpore Politico (1650)
Of Liberty and Necessity (1654)
Elements of Philosophy — De Corpore (1655)
Behemoth (1681); A Dialogue of the Common Laws
Discourse: Locke — Second Treatise of Government (1690)
Discourse: Leslie Stephen — Hobbes (1904)

ThomasHobbes

Solitary, poor, nasty,brutish, and short.

Drawn From the Corpus

Thomas
Hobbes

Solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.