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'''Thomas Hobbes''' an English philosopher (1588-1679), author of Leviathan and the most systematic defender of absolute sovereignty in early modern thought. He grounded political obligation in a materialist account of human nature and in a social contract by which individuals escape the fear and violence of the state of nature at the cost of submission to a sovereign power.

== Life and Intellectual Formation ==
Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 at Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, at a time of alarm at the approach of the Spanish Armada. He studied at Oxford and, at the age of twenty, became tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, later the earls of Devonshire, an association that gave him wealth, leisure and access to the leading minds of his time.

He travelled widely on the continent and met Galileo, Gassendi and other figures of the new science. He also served as tutor in mathematics to the future Charles II during the latter's exile. His engagement with the science of motion, geometry and the mechanical philosophy shaped his conviction that reasoning about human beings, no less than about bodies, could be made systematic.

His long life spanned the upheavals of the civil war, the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy. In 1640, alarmed by the growing conflict between king and parliament, he fled to Paris, and he returned to England in 1651 after Leviathan appeared. He spent his remaining years in controversy, writing on mathematics, theology, law and history until his death at Hardwick Hall in 1679.

== Leviathan and the Social Contract ==
Leviathan, published in 1651, is Hobbes's masterwork. It begins with an account of human beings as matter in motion, driven by appetites and aversions, and of knowledge as the result of sense impressions. The title refers to the sovereign state, described in the book of Job as a great power on earth, and the famous frontispiece shows the commonwealth as an artificial man composed of many bodies.

Hobbes argued that in the state of nature, prior to any government, human beings are roughly equal in body and mind and are moved by competition, diffidence and glory. Their condition is one of war of every man against every man, in which there is no industry, no arts and no security, and life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The fear of violent death drives them to seek peace.

To escape, they agree by covenant to lay down their natural right to all things and to transfer it to a sovereign, on condition that others do the same. This is the social contract, and it is the foundation of Hobbes's political theory. The sovereign may be one man or an assembly, but once constituted he personifies the people and holds their authority by their own act.

== Sovereignty, Law and Liberty ==
Because the sovereign derives his authority from the covenant by which each person authorises his acts, resistance to him is inconsistent with the compact. Hobbes drew from this an argument for absolute and undivided sovereignty: the power of the state must be unified, since division would return the society to the disorders of the state of nature. He was a defender of the monarch but wrote a theory that could equally justify sovereign parliaments.

He was careful to reserve certain liberties to the subject. No one is obliged to accuse himself, to kill himself or to fight under certain conditions, for these fall outside the terms of the cession of right. The sovereign's power is absolute but it is not unlimited, since it derives from the purposes for which it was instituted, above all the protection of life.

Hobbes also argued that law is the command of the sovereign and that it must be interpreted by him, a position that gave him a reputation for erastianism in religion and for a unitary and secular conception of legal authority. The unity of legal sovereignty became a lasting theme of modern jurisprudence.

== Materialism, Language and Religion ==
Hobbes was a thoroughgoing materialist who denied the existence of incorporeal substances and held that everything that exists is body in motion. He applied this view even to God, arguing, to the scandal of his contemporaries, that talk of an immaterial spirit is without meaning. He identified the soul with the animation of the body and rejected the notion of a separate immortal substance.

His philosophy of language was equally radical. He held that truth and falsity belong to propositions rather than to things, and that many disputes, especially in theology, arise from the misuse of words. He treated reasoning as computation, a manipulation of signs that can be performed with the same regularity as arithmetic, an image that anticipates modern logic and philosophy of mind.

On religion he combined conformity in public life with a private rationalism. He argued that the state must control the outward forms of worship to preserve peace, while suggesting that the true content of faith is simple obedience to the laws of God discerned by reason. Leviathan was condemned by royalists and clergy alike, and its author was accused of atheism.

== Controversy and Enduring Influence ==
Hobbes's reputation in his own time was that of an impious and dangerous writer. Leviathan provoked denunciations from both churchmen and defenders of parliamentary authority, and he spent his later years defending his geometry and his doctrine against a stream of criticism. Yet his systematic boldness and his refusal to flatter his readers eventually won him a permanent place in the history of philosophy.

His ideas on the social contract and the state of nature were taken up and modified by Locke and Rousseau, who retained the framework while rejecting the absolutism of the conclusion. His account of the passions and of the coordination of self-interested agents influenced the tradition of political realism and, in later centuries, debates about rationality and cooperation.

He is remembered as the first great modern English political philosopher and as a thinker who tried to do for morals and politics what the new science had done for nature. Whether his portrait of humanity is true or defamatory, the questions he raised about order, obligation and the price of peace remain at the centre of political theory.

== See also ==
* Leviathan
* Social contract
* State of nature
* Sovereignty

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge University Press, 2008.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press, 1996.</ref>
<ref name="r3">A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1999.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, Oxford University Press, 2002.</ref>

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[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:Political science]]
[[Category:England]]

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