Hobbes, Thomas

(1588–1679)

   Philosopher.

   Hobbes was educated at the University of Oxford, England, and acted as tutor to the Cavendish family.

   He spent the years 1640–51 in exile in France where he was the tutor of Charles, Prince of Wales, son of the beheaded charles i. When he returned to England he submitted to Parliamentary rule, although in 1666, after the Restoration, his great work of political philosophy, The Leviathan, was censured in the House of Commons. Hobbes is remembered for his description of natural human life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. He argued that if men did not contract to band together under an absolute sovereign, things would be intolerable. The book succeeded in offending both those who believed in the divine right of kings and those who maintained the right of human liberty. It was regarded as atheistic and immoral. Later, in his Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, he insisted that human beings are bound by a psychological determinism and he must be regarded as the first philosopher to base a theory of conduct on natural science and observed phenomena rather than on abstract principles.

   D. Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory (1988);

   D. Boonin-Vail, Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (1994);

   A. Green, Hobbes and Human Nature (1993).