Thomas Hobbes

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher born in 1588 at Westport in Wiltshire, liked to say that his mother gave birth to twins: "myself and fear." He arrived early, because news had just reached the household that the Spanish Armada was coming. That one remark stayed with him for the rest of his long life. How did a boy from a small Wiltshire town end up arguing with Descartes? Why did a book written among exiled royalists turn those same royalists against him? And why is a man who spent years on geometry remembered in mathematics chiefly for a mistake? The answers run through a wealthy noble family, a circle of thinkers in Paris, and a book named for a monster.

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• 2. Glovemaker's Nephew

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  The biographer John Aubrey reported that Hobbes's father, also named Thomas, was an uneducated man who "disesteemed learning." The elder Thomas was vicar of both Charlton and Westport. A fight with the local clergy outside his church forced him to leave. His older brother Francis, a wealthy glove manufacturer with no family of his own, took charge of the children. Much else about the household is lost, including the name of Hobbes's mother. Hobbes had a sister, Anne, and a brother, Edmund, who was about two years older.

  Lessons began at the Westport church when Thomas was four years old. Next came the Malmesbury school, then a private school run by Robert Latimer, a young graduate of Oxford. Before going up to Oxford himself, Hobbes translated Euripides' Medea from Greek into Latin verse. That translation is now lost.

  He entered Magdalen Hall in 1601 or 1602, the predecessor of Hertford College, Oxford. The teaching there was scholastic logic and mathematics. The principal, John Wilkinson, was a Puritan and left some mark on the student. Hobbes seems to have followed a curriculum of his own, since scholastic learning attracted him little.

  In 1608 Hobbes completed a B.A. by incorporation at St John's College, Cambridge. His master at Magdalen, Sir James Hussey, had recommended him as a tutor. The pupil was William, son of William Cavendish, Baron of Hardwick and later Earl of Devonshire. That began a lifelong connection with the Cavendish family. When the father died in 1626, the pupil inherited the title, held it for two years, and died in 1628. His son, another William, became the 3rd Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes served as tutor and secretary to both men.

  Charles Cavendish, the first earl's younger brother, had two sons who also became patrons of Hobbes. The elder, William Cavendish, later 1st Duke of Newcastle, personally financed an army for Charles I during the Civil War. Hobbes dedicated his Elements of Law to him.

  Between 1610 and 1615 Hobbes accompanied the younger William Cavendish on a grand tour of Europe. The scientific and critical methods he met abroad contrasted with the scholastic philosophy he had learned at Oxford. In Venice he met Fulgenzio Micanzio, a close associate of the scholar and statesman Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi had written against papal claims to worldly power, answering Pope Paul V's Interdict against Venice. James I invited both men to England in 1612. After Cavendish returned home in 1615, he kept up a correspondence with Micanzio and Sarpi, and Hobbes translated Sarpi's Italian letters for Cavendish's circle.

  In 1628 Hobbes published his edition of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, the first English translation made directly from a Greek manuscript. He praised Thucydides as "the most politic historiographer that ever writ." One scholar has suggested that reading Thucydides confirmed, or perhaps crystallized, the broad outlines of Hobbes's own thought. Around the same period he kept company with literary figures such as Ben Jonson. He also worked briefly as an amanuensis to Francis Bacon, translating several of Bacon's Essays into Latin.

  In June 1628 the Earl of Devonshire died of the plague, and his widow, Countess Christian, dismissed Hobbes. Philosophy, the work that would make his name, still lay ahead. He did not turn to it until after 1629.

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• 3. Body, Man and State

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  In 1629 Hobbes found work as tutor to Gervase Clifton, son of Sir Gervase Clifton, 1st Baronet, and spent most of that time in Paris. He kept the post until November 1630. Then he went back to the Cavendishes, teaching William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, the eldest son of his earlier pupil. Over the next seven years, alongside the teaching, he deepened his knowledge of philosophy and grew curious about its great debates.

  In 1636 Hobbes visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. Galileo was under house arrest after his condemnation. Back in Paris, Hobbes became a regular debater in the philosophical groups held together by Marin Mersenne.

  His first area of study was the physics of motion and momentum, though he disdained experimental work. From it he built the system of thought he would labour over for the rest of his life. A first treatise would deal with body, showing that physical phenomena could be explained by motion, as motion was then understood. A second would single out Man and the bodily motions behind sensation, knowledge, affections and passions. The crowning treatise would ask how men were moved to enter society. It would also ask how society must be regulated lest they fall back into "brutishness and misery." Body, Man and State were to form one system.

  Hobbes came home from Paris in 1637 to a country riven with discontent, and the unrest disrupted his orderly plan. By the end of the Short Parliament in 1640 he had written The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. It was never published and circulated only as a manuscript among his acquaintances. Much of its political thought carried over into Leviathan, but one change concerned consent. The Elements held that patrimonial kingdoms were not necessarily formed by the consent of the governed. Leviathan argued that they were, perhaps in reaction to the engagement controversy or to treatises by Patriarchalists such as Sir Robert Filmer.

  In November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded the Short. Hobbes felt he was in disfavour because his treatise had been passed around, so he fled to Paris. He did not return for 11 years.

  There he rejoined Mersenne's circle and wrote a critique of the Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes. It was printed in 1641 as the third set of Objections, with Replies from Descartes. A different set of remarks on other works by Descartes ended all correspondence between the two.

  Hobbes finished De Cive in November 1641. It circulated privately at first but was well received, and its lines of argument were repeated a decade later in Leviathan. He then returned to the first two parts of his system and published little, apart from a short treatise on optics, the Tractatus opticus. It appeared in 1644 in Mersenne's collection Cogitata physico-mathematica. By 1645 his reputation was strong. He was chosen, with Descartes, Gilles de Roberval and others, to referee a dispute between John Pell and Longomontanus over squaring the circle. He would meet that same problem again, as a defendant rather than a judge.

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• 4. Writing Leviathan

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  The English Civil War began in 1642. When the royalist cause started to decline in mid-1644, many royalists arrived in Paris, where Hobbes knew them. Their company revived his interest in politics. De Cive was republished and spread more widely. Printing began in 1646, by Samuel de Sorbiere through the Elsevier press in Amsterdam, with a new preface and notes answering objections.

  In 1647 Hobbes became mathematical instructor to Charles, Prince of Wales, who had come to Paris from Jersey around July. The post lasted until 1648, when Charles went to Holland.

  The company of the exiled royalists led Hobbes to write Leviathan, his theory of civil government set against the crisis of the war. He pictured the State as a monster made of men, created under pressure of human needs and dissolved by civil strife driven by human passions. The book closes with a "Review and Conclusion" asking whether a subject may change allegiance when a former sovereign's power to protect is lost beyond recovery.

  In that same year, 1647, a near-fatal illness disabled him for six months. He stayed in or near Paris throughout the writing. On recovering, he resumed the task and finished it by 1650.

  A pirated edition of The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic appeared in 1650. It was split into two small volumes: Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policie, and De corpore politico. In 1651 came a translation of De Cive titled Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society. Scholars disagree about whether Hobbes made that translation himself.

  Leviathan appeared in mid-1651 under the long title Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. Its title-page engraving shows a crowned giant, drawn from the waist up, towering above hills and a landscape. He holds a sword and a crozier, and his body is made up of tiny human figures.

  The impact was immediate. Soon Hobbes was both praised and condemned more than any other thinker of his time. Publication cut his link with the exiled royalists, who might well have killed him. The secularist spirit of the book angered Anglicans and French Catholics alike. Hobbes appealed to the revolutionary English government for protection and fled back to London in the winter of 1651. After submitting to the Council of State, he was allowed to settle into private life in Fetter Lane.

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• 5. War of All Against All

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  According to Christopher Hill, Hobbes found official political thought insisting that government must be obeyed because God ordained it. Hobbes replaced that with the theory that people instituted the state for their own convenience. They should obey it because disobedience can be shown to bring worse consequences in almost every case. For Hobbes, expediency rather than morality was the motive for political obedience.

  He meant his theory to work like geometry, with conclusions following inevitably from premises. In it, the state or society cannot be secure unless it is at the disposal of an absolute sovereign. It follows that no individual can hold property rights against the sovereign, who may take subjects' goods without consent. This view gained its weight from the 1630s, when Charles I sought to raise revenues without the consent of Parliament. Hobbes also rejected a famous thesis of Aristotle, that human beings are naturally suited to life in a polis. He carried his mechanistic view of nature into politics, which makes him a forerunner of the term "social structure."

  In Leviathan, Hobbes begins from a mechanistic picture of human beings and their passions. He then imagines life without government, which he calls the state of nature. There each person would have a right, or licence, to everything in the world. That, he argues, leads to a "war of all against all," in Latin bellum omnium contra omnes. His description is among the best-known passages in English philosophy. Such a condition leaves no industry, no navigation, no arts and no letters. Worst of all, in his words, is "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

  Fear of death, and lack of the things needed for comfortable living, push people toward a social contract. Each individual cedes some right to a sovereign authority in return for protection. Because the sovereign's power comes from individuals surrendering their own, it cannot be resisted. People are therefore the authors of every decision the sovereign makes. In his words: "he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he himself is the author."

  Hobbes allowed no separation of powers. Any division of authority, he argued, would breed internal strife and endanger the stability an absolute sovereign provides. The sovereign must hold civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers, and even control the words.

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• 6. Bishop and Professor

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  In 1654 Bishop John Bramhall published a small treatise, Of Liberty and Necessity, aimed at Hobbes. Bramhall, a strong Arminian, had met and debated with Hobbes, then written down his views and sent them privately for an answer. Hobbes replied, but not for publication. A French acquaintance copied the reply and printed it with "an extravagantly laudatory epistle." Bramhall countered in 1655 by printing everything that passed between them. He gave it the title A Defence of the True Liberty of Human Actions from Antecedent or Extrinsic Necessity.

  Hobbes was ready in 1656 with The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, replying to the bishop "with astonishing force." Perhaps the first clear exposition of the psychological doctrine of determinism, his two pieces mattered in the history of the free will controversy. In 1658 Bramhall returned with Castigations of Mr Hobbes's Animadversions. It carried a bulky appendix called The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale.

  The mathematician John Wallis became a more persistent enemy. In Leviathan, Hobbes had assailed the system of the original universities. In 1655 he published De Corpore, which held tendentious views on mathematics and an erroneous proof of squaring the circle. Mathematicians began to target him, and Wallis led the charge.

  From 1655 the two men kept up name-calling and bickering for nearly a quarter of a century. Hobbes never admitted his error. The quarrel gained such notoriety that it is now counted among the most infamous feuds in the history of mathematics. His pamphlets show the tone. One was Six Lessons to the Professor of Mathematics, in 1656. In 1657 came Stigmai, or Marks of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church Politics, and Barbarisms of John Wallis. In 1671 the fight even reached the Royal Society, with three papers presented there against Wallis.

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• 7. Heresy and Censorship

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  In The Elements of Law, Hobbes gave a cosmological argument for the existence of God, calling him "the first cause of all causes." Even so, several contemporaries accused him of atheism. Bishop Bramhall charged him with teachings that could lead to atheism. In his answer to The Catching of Leviathan, Hobbes wrote that "atheism, impiety, and the like are words of the greatest defamation possible." He always defended himself against the charge. Scholars such as Richard Tuck and J. G. A. Pocock have made much of his religious views, and there is still wide disagreement about what they mean.

  A. P. Martinich has pointed out that in Hobbes's time "atheist" was often applied to people who believed in God but not in divine providence, or whose other beliefs seemed inconsistent with orthodox Christianity. In that broad sense, Hobbes did take positions at odds with church teaching. He argued repeatedly that there are no incorporeal substances. All things, including human thoughts and even God, heaven and hell, were for him matter in motion. He wrote that "though Scripture acknowledge spirits, yet doth it nowhere say, that they are incorporeal, meaning thereby without dimensions and quantity." He claimed to be following Tertullian. Like John Locke, he held that true revelation can never disagree with human reason and experience. He also argued that people should accept revelation and its interpretations for the same reason they accept their sovereign's commands, to avoid war.

  After the Restoration, Hobbes gained a new prominence. "Hobbism" became a byword for all that respectable society ought to denounce. Yet the young king, Charles II, was his former pupil. He remembered Hobbes, called him to court, and granted him a pension of 100 pounds.

  The king's protection mattered in 1666, when the House of Commons introduced a bill against atheism and profaneness. On the 17th of October 1666 a committee was empowered to receive information about books tending toward atheism, blasphemy and profaneness. The order named in particular "the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan." Hobbes was terrified of being labelled a heretic and burned some of his compromising papers. He also studied the actual state of the law of heresy. He announced his findings in three short Dialogues, added as an appendix to his Latin translation of Leviathan, published in Amsterdam in 1668. There he argued that since the High Court of Commission had been put down, no court of heresy remained to which he was answerable. Nothing, he maintained, could be heresy except opposing the Nicene Creed, which Leviathan did not do.

  The only result of the bill was that Hobbes could never again publish anything in England on subjects relating to human conduct. His 1668 collected works were printed in Amsterdam because he could not obtain the censor's licence. For some time he was not even allowed to answer attacks from his enemies. Still, his reputation abroad was formidable. Behemoth, his history of the causes of the civil wars of England, was written in 1668. It was held back at the king's request and did not appear until 1681.

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• 8. The Last Years

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  In 1658 Hobbes published De Homine, the final section of his philosophical system. That completed a scheme he had planned more than 19 years before. Most of the book is an elaborate theory of vision, and the rest partly covers topics treated more fully in Human Nature and Leviathan. He also kept producing controversial writings on mathematics, including geometry, and further philosophical works. As late as 1678 he published Decameron Physiologicum, ten dialogues of natural philosophy.

  For his last four or five years, Hobbes lived at Chatsworth House, the estate of the Cavendish family. His host was his patron William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire. His final works were an autobiography in Latin verse in 1672 and a translation of four books of the Odyssey into "rugged" English rhymes in 1673. That effort grew into a complete translation of both the Iliad and the Odyssey in 1675.

  In October 1679 Hobbes suffered a bladder disorder and then a paralytic stroke. He died on the 4th of December 1679, aged 91, at Hardwick Hall, which the Cavendish family owned. His last words were said to have been "A great leap in the dark," uttered in his final conscious moments. He was buried in St John the Baptist's Church at Ault Hucknall in Derbyshire. After his death, many of his manuscripts were found at Chatsworth House.

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