Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588–4 December 1679) was an English philosopher best known for his contribution to political philosophy, particularly in Leviathan (1651). Writing amid the conflicts surrounding the English Civil Wars, he sought to explain how people could establish a durable political order. His account of a social covenant justified an undivided sovereign authority charged with maintaining peace and protection, while recognizing certain liberties that subjects could not surrender. (en.wikisource.org)
Hobbes’s interests extended beyond politics to ethics, language, metaphysics, natural philosophy, mathematics, history, and translation. He developed materialist explanations of human beings and examined how sensation, reasoning, and the passions shape conduct. His writings connected questions about knowledge and human motivation with the foundations of law, sovereignty, and religious authority, making him a significant participant in seventeenth-century intellectual life and a continuing subject of philosophical interpretation. (plato.stanford.edu)
Education, Patronage, and Political Upheaval
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 at Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, the son of a local clergyman also named Thomas Hobbes. His uncle Francis, a prosperous glover, financed his education. After schooling at Westport and Malmesbury, Hobbes studied with Robert Latimer, whose instruction developed his command of Greek and Latin; the early biographical tradition credits him with translating Euripides’ Medea into Latin verse before the age of fourteen. He entered Magdalen Hall at the University of Oxford in 1602 or 1603 and graduated BA in February 1608. His education combined classical languages with the university’s scholastic curriculum, although his later intellectual interests moved away from its Aristotelian framework. (en.wikisource.org)
In 1608 Hobbes entered the Cavendish household as tutor to William Cavendish, subsequently second Earl of Devonshire—not to his father, the future first earl. He became his pupil’s companion and secretary, beginning an association with successive generations of the family that lasted, with interruptions, for most of his life. Household employment supplied material support, access to substantial libraries, and opportunities for foreign travel unavailable through a university appointment. He accompanied William on a continental tour beginning in 1610. After William’s death in 1628, Hobbes briefly tutored the son of Sir Gervase Clifton; in 1631 he returned to the Devonshire family to educate his former pupil’s son, the third earl. (mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk)
Cavendish patronage also connected Hobbes with intellectual networks beyond the Devonshire household. The family’s Welbeck branch, particularly William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, and his brother Charles, supported the circulation and discussion of scientific writings. During another continental journey in the mid-1630s, Hobbes entered the Paris circle of Marin Mersenne, through which he encountered contemporary work in mathematics and natural philosophy. He subsequently contributed objections to René Descartes’s Meditations, published with that work in 1641. Some familiar episodes require more cautious attribution: John Aubrey reported Hobbes’s friendship with Galileo at Florence, whereas Hobbes’s own autobiographical writings mention meeting Mersenne but not Galileo. (rep.routledge.com)
The political crisis of 1640 disrupted this pattern of household service and travel. Following the meeting of the Long Parliament in November, Hobbes left England for Paris, fearing danger because of his royalist connections and the arguments for sovereign authority circulating in his Elements of Law. His exile lasted until 1651 and thus encompassed the English Civil Wars, which began in 1642. In Paris he maintained scholarly friendships, notably with Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi, while associating with royalist refugees. In 1646 he became mathematics tutor to the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. This was a teaching engagement rather than a political office. The publication of Leviathan in 1651 nevertheless damaged his standing at the royalist court, where its religious arguments and account of political obedience provoked suspicion. (plato.stanford.edu)
Hobbes returned to England late in 1651, submitted to the Commonwealth authorities, and resumed his place in the Cavendish household in 1653. The Restoration of 1660 renewed his connection with his former royal pupil: Charles II granted him an annual pension of £100. Royal favour did not remove ecclesiastical and parliamentary hostility. In 1666 a Commons committee considering legislation against atheism and profaneness was specifically authorized to investigate Leviathan; Charles subsequently restricted Hobbes’s publication of political and religious works. Hobbes finally left London in 1675 and spent his remaining years at the Devonshire estates of Chatsworth and Hardwick. He died at Hardwick Hall on 4 December 1679, aged ninety-one, and was buried at Hault Hucknall church. (en.wikisource.org)
Major Writings and the Architecture of His Philosophy
The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic circulated in manuscript in 1640 and appeared in print in 1650 in two separate publications, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Its argument moves from human faculties—including sensation, imagination, reasoning, and the passions—to the formation and authority of political society. This progression established a recurring feature of Hobbes’s political philosophy: explaining collective arrangements through an account of the individuals who constitute them. The work must nevertheless be distinguished from his separate Elements of Philosophy, a three-part project extending beyond human nature and politics to the general study of bodies. In particular, De Corpore Politico, concerning the body politic, is not the later De Corpore, concerning body generally. (plato.stanford.edu)
The intended sequence of the Elements of Philosophy was De Corpore (“On Body”), De Homine (“On Man”), and De Cive (“On the Citizen”). Publication reversed that logical order: De Cive appeared in 1642, De Corpore in 1655, and De Homine in 1658. De Corpore treats logic, language, method, first philosophy, mathematics, and physics; De Homine includes substantial discussions of physiology and optics; De Cive organizes its political argument under liberty, dominion, and religion. Hobbes explained in its preface that disputes over governmental authority and subjects’ duties in England had prompted him to bring the political portion forward. The sequence therefore expressed a proposed order of understanding, not the chronological development or publication of his books. (plato.stanford.edu)
Leviathan, published in English in 1651, presents another systematic arrangement rather than simply reproducing the trilogy. Its four parts comprise 47 chapters: Part I, concerning human beings, occupies chapters 1–16; Part II, concerning the commonwealth, chapters 17–31; Part III, concerning a Christian commonwealth, chapters 32–43; and Part IV, concerning the kingdom of darkness, chapters 44–47. The movement is from perception, speech, reasoning, and motivation to political authorization, sovereign rights, and civil law, followed by an extensive examination of Scripture and religious authority. The final part addresses what Hobbes regards as sources of spiritual and intellectual error, including misinterpretations of Scripture and misleading philosophical doctrines. (gutenberg.org)
Its full title, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, makes the ecclesiastical dimension integral to the undertaking. The book does not first establish a secular state and then append an unrelated theological discussion: its later parts examine whether claims grounded in Christianity can authorize commands competing with civil sovereignty. The title thus identifies both the construction of political authority and the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical power as central subjects. (gutenberg.org)
Hobbes’s architecture belongs to the seventeenth-century effort to establish demonstrative knowledge of nature and politics. Definitions, connected inferences, and explanations through causes were meant to replace merely persuasive disputes. Yet systematic arrangement does not establish that every political conclusion depends on his physics. In the preface to De Cive, Hobbes compares understanding a commonwealth to understanding a clock by considering its components separately: political analysis examines human beings as though their existing association had been dissolved. He also explicitly states that the political portion could stand on its own principles, known through experience, without the preceding two portions. His claim to a demonstrative civil science therefore coexists with an independent route into its premises through knowledge of human conduct. (plato.stanford.edu)
Body, Motion, and Scientific Method
Hobbes’s materialism treated human beings, including their mental activities, as corporeal. Natural explanation therefore concerned bodies and their motions, rather than an immaterial mind acting upon matter. In Leviathan (1651), he rejected “incorporeal substance” as a contradictory expression: on his account, substance meant body. In De Corpore (1655), he attacked the inference from conceptual abstraction to independent existence. Considering thought without considering its bodily subject did not establish that thought could exist without a body; likewise, considering quantity separately did not make quantity an independently existing thing. This criticism targeted both scholastic accounts of separated essences and the immaterial thinking substance defended by René Descartes. His alternative sought explanations through bodily processes rather than through entities introduced by abstraction. (plato.stanford.edu)
His account of scientific method made knowledge of causes central. Chapter 6 of De Corpore distinguished analysis, or resolution, from synthesis, or composition: inquiry could proceed from an observed effect toward its possible generation, or from a known generation toward its consequences. Definitions established the starting points of demonstration, but a causal definition did more than assign a label: it specified how something could be produced. A circle, for example, could be understood through the motion of a body around a fixed centre at an unchanging distance. Knowing that construction allowed the geometer to derive properties of the resulting figure. Conversely, reasoning backward from a figure could identify a possible construction without establishing how that particular figure had actually been made. Geometry thus supplied a model of intelligibility grounded in generation, not merely a collection of abstract propositions. (homepages.uc.edu)
Hobbes developed this programme through optics, connecting geometrical accounts of images with physical explanations of illumination and vision. His A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques, completed in Paris in 1646 and dedicated to William Cavendish, marquess of Newcastle, remained unpublished as a complete treatise. It comprised two parts, “On Illumination” and “On Vision”; material from the latter entered De Homine (1658). The work examined light, colours, pinholes, burning glasses, prisms, and the formation of visual images. His explanations treated light as motion transmitted through a material medium, rather than simply as bodies emitted from a luminous source. These were interventions in seventeenth-century natural philosophy, not formulations of later electromagnetic optics. Geometry helped connect an external arrangement of bodies with the image appearing to a perceiver. (celm.folger.edu)
His mechanical explanations likewise sought to account for change through motion and its communication. Nevertheless, confidence in geometrical demonstration did not guarantee successful mathematics. De Corpore provoked sustained criticism from John Wallis and Seth Ward, particularly over Hobbes’s unsuccessful attempts to square the circle. Hobbes answered the Oxford professors in Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematicks (1656), appended to the English edition of De Corpore. The controversy concerned both particular proofs and the foundations of mathematical practice; Hobbes continued defending constructions that did not establish the claimed result. (plato.stanford.edu)
A different dispute concerned the status of experimental knowledge. Robert Boyle’s air-pump investigations, published in New Experiments Physico-Mechanical (1660), became the target of Hobbes’s Dialogus Physicus, sive De Natura Aeris (1661). Hobbes challenged the explanatory conclusions drawn from evacuation experiments and defended an account in which material processes, rather than an empty space, explained the effects. The disagreement extended beyond the apparatus to the standards of natural philosophy: Boyle emphasized experimentally established matters of fact, whereas Hobbes demanded an account of their causal production. Boyle replied in An Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes his Dialogus Physicus de Naturâ Aëris (1662), defending his investigations and challenging Hobbes’s explanations of air, fluidity, and firmness. (jstor.org)
Sensation, Language, and Reasoning
In chapters 1–2 of Leviathan (1651), Hobbes explains sensation through a sequence of bodily motions. An external object presses upon a sensory organ, directly in touch and taste or through an intervening medium in sight, hearing, and smell. Motion passes inward through nerves and membranes to the brain and heart, producing a resistance or counterpressure that appears to the perceiver as something external. Sensory appearance is therefore an effect of bodily interaction, not the transmission of an object’s qualities unchanged into the mind. Imagination continues this process after the object has disappeared: the motion persists, although subsequent impressions obscure it. Hobbes calls this “decaying sense”; imagination names the appearance retained, while memory emphasizes its fading character. Even apparently invented images depend on sensory materials: a centaur combines previously perceived human and equine features. His account of mind thus derives the materials of thought from sensation without restricting thought to the reproduction of whole objects previously encountered. (gutenberg.org)
Language gives these fleeting thoughts durable marks and communicable form. In chapter 4 of Leviathan, Hobbes distinguishes names used as private reminders from words connected and ordered as signs of thoughts to other people. A name can recall a conception during solitary reflection; speech allows another person to recognize what the speaker conceives, desires, or intends. De Corpore (1655), chapter 2, sharpens the distinction: names function as communicative signs insofar as they form parts of speech. Naming something and communicating a thought about it are consequently not identical operations. This distinction helps explain how linguistic practices support both individual recollection and shared instruction. (plato.stanford.edu)
Hobbes’s nominalism locates universality in names rather than in independently existing universal objects or ideas. “Tree” applies to many individual trees because of their similarities; it does not name an additional universal tree existing alongside them. Nor must speakers possess a single universal mental image: the image associated with a common name can itself be particular. Generality belongs to the name’s application across cases. In Leviathan, chapter 4, the example of triangles shows why this matters for knowledge: a result established from the defining characteristics of a triangle can be registered in general words and applied beyond the particular diagram examined. Universal propositions need not presuppose universal entities. (gutenberg.org)
Definitions stabilize this use of names. Because truth and falsehood concern the ordering of names in assertions, inquiry must establish their meanings before building arguments from them. Otherwise an unnoticed shift of meaning can propagate through an entire demonstration. Hobbes distinguishes legitimate verbal ornament from language suitable for inquiry: metaphor may delight, but transferred meanings can mislead when treated as precise explanatory terms. Other abuses include expressing intentions falsely and using speech to injure. His criticism therefore concerns not language as such, but failures to control its meanings and uses. (gutenberg.org)
In chapter 5, Hobbes describes reasoning as reckoning: adding and subtracting the consequences of general names. This extends beyond numerical calculation to logic, where names form propositions and propositions combine in syllogisms. Scientific understanding requires an ordered progression from definitions through connected consequences, rather than merely accepting a conclusion on authority. Such demonstration differs from prudence, the capacity to anticipate events from remembered sequences of experience. Experience can suggest that a familiar event will have a familiar outcome, but altered circumstances can defeat that expectation. Science instead identifies consequences: how one assertion follows from another, or how an effect follows from specified conditions. For Hobbes, this disciplined ability is acquired through language, method, and instruction, not supplied fully formed at birth. (gutenberg.org)
Passions, Moral Judgment, and Voluntary Action
In chapter 6 of Leviathan (1651), Hobbes explains the passions as bodily beginnings of action. He distinguishes vital motions, such as circulation and digestion, from voluntary motions, such as walking and speaking, which depend on prior imagination. “Endeavour” names the minute internal motion preceding visible action: directed toward something, it is appetite or desire; directed away, aversion. Pleasure and displeasure are the felt appearances of motions that assist or hinder vital activity; pain concerns present sensation, while grief concerns anticipated consequences. (barryfvaughan.org)
This account connects psychology with moral judgment. People call the objects of their desires good and those of their aversions evil; these descriptions do not identify properties independent of the person evaluating them. Bodily constitution and experience help explain differences in evaluation. Nevertheless, Hobbes distinguishes personal judgment from a public standard: within a commonwealth, its representative supplies a common rule, while disputants may also accept an arbitrator’s judgment. Private preference therefore does not itself determine authoritative public judgment. (barryfvaughan.org)
Felicity is continuing success in obtaining successive objects of desire, not permanent tranquillity or possession of a final, all-satisfying good. In chapters 10–11, power means present resources for obtaining a future apparent good, including strength, knowledge, wealth, friends, and reputation. Honour acknowledges another’s power, rather than necessarily approving its use morally. The continuing pursuit of power need not arise from dissatisfaction with present pleasures: securing the means of future satisfaction also requires it. Anticipation consequently makes present happiness dependent on expectations about future security and opportunity. (gutenberg.org)
Deliberation is the alternating succession of appetites, aversions, hopes, and fears concerning an action and its consequences. The will is the last appetite or aversion immediately preceding action or omission, not a separate faculty standing outside this sequence. Hobbes consequently allows nonhuman animals both deliberation and will. Actions motivated by fear can likewise be voluntary. (barryfvaughan.org)
Chapter 21 makes voluntary action compatible with causal necessity. An action is free when external obstacles do not prevent someone from doing what that person wills; the will itself nevertheless results from preceding causes. Hobbes illustrates the distinction with someone who throws goods overboard for fear that a ship will sink: the action proceeds willingly, although fear motivates it. His position, now classified as compatibilism, locates freedom in unimpeded action rather than exemption from causal determination. (gutenberg.org)
This distinction became central to Hobbes’s controversy with John Bramhall. Their exchange began in 1645 at the Paris residence of William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle. Bramhall defended freedom against antecedent causal necessity; Hobbes maintained that necessary causes did not abolish voluntary action. Written statements followed the discussion. Hobbes’s Of Liberty and Necessity appeared without his authorization in 1654; Bramhall published A Defence of True Liberty in 1655, and Hobbes answered with The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance in 1656. The dispute concerned whether acting voluntarily required a will not necessitated by antecedent causes. (cambridge.org)
The State of Nature and the Laws of Nature
In chapters 13–15 of Leviathan (1651), Hobbes describes the state of nature as a condition without a common authority capable of keeping people secure and enforcing their agreements. It is not simply a universal prehistoric stage: the argument concerns what happens wherever effective common power is absent, including civil war and relations between independent sovereigns. Natural equality supplies its starting point. Hobbes does not claim that everyone possesses identical abilities; rather, differences are insufficient to guarantee anyone’s security. Even the weakest can kill the strongest through deception or alliance. This shared vulnerability, together with comparable hopes of attaining desired ends, prevents any individual from enjoying an unchallengeable natural superiority. (plato.stanford.edu)
Hobbes identifies three principal causes of conflict: competition, diffidence, and glory. Competition produces attacks for gain, especially when people desire something they cannot jointly enjoy. Diffidence means mutual distrust: because another person may attack, anticipatory violence can appear necessary even to someone seeking only safety. The presence of conquerors who pursue power beyond their immediate needs makes merely defensive restraint still less secure. Glory produces violence over reputation, including perceived insults conveyed by words, gestures, or disagreement. Consequently, conflict does not require everyone to be exceptionally aggressive. Vulnerability and uncertainty can make peaceful intentions insufficient to prevent hostility. (gutenberg.org)
The resulting condition of war is not uninterrupted fighting. It is an enduring, publicly evident readiness to fight where there is no reliable assurance of peace. Hobbes compares it to bad weather, which consists in a continuing tendency rather than a single shower. Its consequences extend beyond physical violence: cultivation, commerce, construction, and learning become insecure because their benefits may be seized. His examples of travellers carrying weapons and householders locking doors show how distrust persists even under established government; they illustrate the insecurity that common protection restrains rather than establish that all human relationships involve actual combat. (gutenberg.org)
Against this background, Hobbes distinguishes the right of nature, jus naturale, from a law of nature, lex naturalis. The former is each person’s liberty to use whatever means that person judges necessary for self-preservation. Without common security, this extends to a right to everything, even another person’s body; it is not a system of mutually protected entitlements. A law of nature, by contrast, is a rational precept forbidding conduct destructive of life or its preservation. Right leaves action or inaction open, whereas law imposes an obligation. The first fundamental law therefore directs people to seek peace when it is attainable, while retaining the liberty to use the means of war when peace cannot be obtained. (gutenberg.org)
The second law requires reciprocal restraint: a person should relinquish the unrestricted right to everything when others are willing to do likewise, accepting only as much liberty against others as they would allow against themselves. Unilateral disarmament is not required. The third law commands the performance of covenants, making covenant-breaking the basis of injustice. Yet agreements involving future performance face an assurance problem: whoever performs first may become vulnerable to a partner’s defection. Hobbes specifies that reasonable suspicion arising after an agreement can invalidate a covenant of mutual trust in the natural condition. An effective coercive authority removes that justification for non-performance by making breach punishable. (gutenberg.org)
The distinction between inward and outward obligation addresses this insecurity. Natural laws always bind in foro interno: people must sincerely desire their realization and be disposed toward peace. They do not always bind in foro externo, requiring immediate outward performance regardless of circumstances. Someone who invariably behaves peacefully and fulfils promises among people who do not reciprocate would become their prey, defeating the preservation that grounds these laws. Conversely, someone who receives adequate assurance of reciprocal observance must not withhold compliance. Further precepts—including gratitude, pardon upon assurance of future conduct, recognition of natural equality, and impartial arbitration—specify practices through which peaceful cooperation can be maintained. (gutenberg.org)
Covenant, Representation, and Sovereign Power
In Leviathan (1651), chapters XVI–XVIII, Hobbes explains political unity through authorization rather than mere agreement about common interests. A natural person speaks or acts in their own name; an artificial person represents another’s words or actions. Within this relationship, the “actor” performs the action, while the “author” owns it and supplies the authority to act. Applied to political representation, this distinction explains how a multitude becomes a commonwealth: individuals authorize one man or assembly to bear their collective person. Unity belongs to the representative, not to an independently unified population. An assembly can therefore constitute one representative person, with its decisions determined by majority vote. Representation here means authorized action, not necessarily election, resemblance to constituents, or continuing accountability to them. (gutenberg.org)
The covenant establishing sovereignty by institution is made by each prospective subject with every other, not between the population and its future ruler. Each agrees to relinquish self-government and authorize the designated representative, provided the others do likewise. Those who accept this procedure undertake to recognize the majority’s choice even if they vote against the successful candidate or assembly. Because the instituted sovereign receives authority through agreements among subjects, rather than making a reciprocal founding promise to them, Hobbes denies that subjects can release themselves from obedience by alleging the sovereign’s breach of that covenant. He also argues that, as authors of sovereign acts, they cannot accuse the sovereign of injuring them in the strict sense of contractual injustice. This does not make every sovereign action morally right: Hobbes distinguishes injustice toward subjects from wrongdoing against the laws of nature. (gutenberg.org)
Chapter XX distinguishes institution from sovereignty by acquisition. In institution, people submit because they fear one another; in acquisition, they submit to someone whose power they already fear. Hobbes rejects the proposition that fear alone invalidates an agreement, since fear motivates both routes to political order. His example of conquest nevertheless makes authorization, rather than military victory by itself, decisive. A defeated person becomes subject by promising obedience in exchange for life and bodily liberty. A captive kept in chains without such an undertaking remains an enemy, not an obligated subject. Acquired and instituted sovereignty possess the same rights: different circumstances of submission do not create different grades of sovereign authority. (gutenberg.org)
The rights attached to sovereignty in chapter XVIII form an inseparable set of means necessary for peace and defence. They include making laws, determining rules of property, adjudicating controversies, declaring war and peace, commanding armed forces, choosing counsellors and public officers, and assigning rewards and punishments. The sovereign also judges which publicly taught opinions threaten peace and who may examine books before publication. These powers may be exercised through subordinate officials, but their ultimate authority cannot be divided among competing independent holders. For example, control of armed force without authority to raise the resources maintaining it would be ineffective. Hobbes therefore rejects a division of supreme powers that leaves rival institutions able to obstruct one another without a final common judge. (gutenberg.org)
Chapter XIX classifies commonwealths by the identity of their sovereign: monarchy places sovereignty in one person, aristocracy in a restricted assembly, and democracy in an assembly open to all entitled participants. All three possess the same sovereign rights; absolutism is not synonymous with monarchy. Hobbes nevertheless prefers monarchy on practical grounds, arguing that a monarch’s private interest is more closely connected with public prosperity and that a single ruler can consult advisers confidentially and consistently. These are comparative claims about governmental effectiveness, not additional foundations of authority. He treats “tyranny” and “oligarchy” as disapproving names for monarchy and aristocracy rather than separate constitutional forms. (gutenberg.org)
Civil Law, Subjects’ Liberties, and Public Administration
In chapter 26 of Leviathan (1651), Hobbes defines civil law through its authoritative source: it consists of rules communicated by the commonwealth to people already obliged to obey it. Such rules must be made sufficiently known through speech, writing, or other intelligible signs. The sovereign alone possesses legislative authority; judges interpret and apply law through authority derived from it, rather than through an independent jurisdiction. Custom likewise acquires legal force through sovereign consent, not merely through antiquity. Civil and natural law are mutually connected: natural law requires keeping covenants, including the covenant of obedience, while civil institutions give determinate, enforceable application to requirements such as equity and justice. The sovereign is not bound by civil laws that it can repeal, but remains obliged by natural law. (gutenberg.org)
Chapter 21 distinguishes bodily liberty—the absence of external obstacles to movement—from subjects’ freedom to act where law prescribes no rule. Fear does not itself remove liberty: someone who pays a debt to avoid imprisonment still acts voluntarily. Within the commonwealth, unregulated activities remain matters of individual discretion; Hobbes gives examples including buying and selling, choosing an occupation or residence, and educating children. These permissions are not constitutionally entrenched against subsequent legislation. Their extent varies with the sovereign’s decisions about what requires regulation. (gutenberg.org)
Other liberties arise from rights that cannot effectively be surrendered by covenant. A person ordered to kill or mutilate himself, forgo necessities of life, or refrain from resisting an assault may disobey, even when lawfully condemned. Similarly, an accused person need not confess his own crime without assurance of pardon: authorization of sovereign action does not amount to a promise of self-accusation. These liberties do not necessarily eliminate the sovereign’s authority to punish. Nor does self-preservation excuse every dangerous refusal: Hobbes requires those able to bear arms to assist when their participation is indispensable to the commonwealth’s defence. (gutenberg.org)
Protection also determines the duration of political obligation. Subjects owe obedience only while the sovereign retains the power to protect them. A captive offered life and bodily freedom on condition of submission to a conqueror may accept; a decisive military defeat that destroys the commonwealth’s protective capacity releases subjects to seek security elsewhere. This is distinct from a general entitlement to overthrow an existing government. Hobbes nevertheless permits people already facing death for rebellion to combine in immediate self-defence, while maintaining that their original breach of duty was unjust. An offer of pardon removes that particular justification for continued resistance. (gutenberg.org)
Punishment, in chapter 28, is harm imposed by public authority for an adjudged legal transgression, directed toward future obedience. Its purposes include correcting the offender and deterring others, not satisfying anger or taking revenge. Private retaliation, harm inflicted without prior public condemnation, and suffering imposed without any prospect of encouraging obedience do not qualify as punishment in this technical sense. Chapter 30 accordingly connects severity with public danger while allowing leniency where fear, necessity, provocation, or ignorance mitigates an offence. (gutenberg.org)
The sovereign’s administrative responsibilities extend beyond preventing violent death to securing conditions for lawful industry and the comforts it produces. Public instruction must explain the grounds of political authority, since threats alone cannot sustain obedience. Good laws should be necessary, intelligible, and accompanied by clear explanations of their purposes. In taxation, Hobbes favours assessing consumption rather than accumulated wealth, arguing that saving the proceeds of labour should not attract heavier burdens than spending them. People rendered incapable of supporting themselves by unavoidable circumstances should receive legally organized provision for their necessities, rather than depend on uncertain private charity. For the able-bodied, he instead advocates compulsory work and laws encouraging employment in agriculture, navigation, fishing, and manufacturing. (gutenberg.org)
Religion, Scripture, and Ecclesiastical Authority
In chapter 12 of Leviathan (1651), Hobbes explains religion through human curiosity about causes, anxiety about future misfortune, and dependence on testimony when causes remain unknown. Belief in invisible powers develops from these dispositions; education, custom, and political institutions shape it into particular religions. This psychological account does not simply identify all religion with error. Hobbes distinguishes fear-generated beliefs from reasoning toward a first cause, called God, while denying that such reasoning supplies an adequate conception of God’s nature. Natural reason can support belief that God exists without establishing the particular doctrines claimed through revelation. His theological language frequently treats divine attributes as expressions of honour rather than literal descriptions of an incomprehensible being. (gutenberg.org)
Claims of revelation therefore require examination rather than automatic obedience. In chapter 32, Hobbes distinguishes God’s immediate communication to a recipient from another person’s report of that communication: dreaming that God has spoken does not establish divine authority over others. Drawing on Deuteronomy 13, he identifies miracles and conformity to the already established divine religion as jointly necessary credentials of a prophet. Chapter 37 likewise distinguishes genuine miracles from deception and from events that appear miraculous merely because their natural causes are unknown. Individuals retain inward freedom to assess reports, but the sovereign determines their public recognition. Since miracles authenticating new prophets have ceased, Hobbes directs Christians to the Scriptures rather than contemporary claims to extraordinary inspiration. (gutenberg.org)
His treatment of scriptural authority combines textual criticism with an account of public law. In chapter 33, references to Moses’s death and retrospective descriptions of events support his argument that the Pentateuch, in its surviving form, was not wholly written by Moses. He also separates the question whether Scripture is God’s word from the question how it acquires binding legal authority: for subjects without immediate revelation, its public authorization and authoritative interpretation belong to the commonwealth. Chapters 38 and 44 challenge the natural immortality of a separable soul. Eternal life is restored through bodily resurrection, and the redeemed inhabit God’s future kingdom on earth, rather than existing eternally as disembodied souls. In chapter 43, salvation requires faith that Jesus is the Christ and sincere endeavour to obey God’s laws; repentance matters because perfect obedience is unattainable. (gutenberg.org)
Ecclesiastical authority cannot constitute a second, independent sovereignty. In chapter 39, a church capable of assembling and acting as one public body requires authorization from civil power; a Christian commonwealth and its church are the same people considered under different descriptions. Before Christian rulers authorized their public ministry, the apostles taught and persuaded rather than exercised coercive jurisdiction. Chapter 42 applies this distinction against Cardinal Robert Bellarmine’s defence of papal power, including the claim that spiritual authority could justify intervention in temporal government. A sovereign may delegate ecclesiastical administration to bishops, an assembly of pastors, or even the pope, but such jurisdiction derives from civil authorization and remains revocable. This restriction concerns public teaching and action, not the sovereign’s ability to manufacture inward belief, which Hobbes denies. (gutenberg.org)
Contemporaries nevertheless accused Hobbes of atheism, sometimes meaning denial of God and sometimes doctrinal heterodoxy or the subordination of clergy to civil authority. His published works affirm God’s existence and defend their compatibility with Christianity; these statements and hostile accusations do not independently settle his private convictions. The Latin Leviathan of 1668 revised controversial theological discussions and added an appendix addressing, among other matters, the Trinity and God’s nature. Its defence of divine corporeality departed from the earlier emphasis on the unknowability of divine attributes: the later Hobbes maintained that extension could be attributed to God. These are documented changes in his expressed theology, whereas readings of him as a concealed atheist or a sincere, unconventional Christian remain interpretations. (plato.stanford.edu)
History, Translation, and Literary Practice
Hobbes’s Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre (1629), translated directly from the Greek of Thucydides, treated classical history as an instrument of political judgment. In his address to readers, Hobbes explained that knowledge of past actions should cultivate prudence in present affairs and foresight about future consequences. He particularly admired a narrative that placed readers imaginatively inside assemblies, civil disturbances, and battles, allowing them to assess decisions through their circumstances and outcomes. His translation also involved geographical scholarship: dissatisfied with available maps, he constructed a map of Greece using ancient authorities, including Strabo and Pausanias, and supplied an index identifying evidence for disputed locations. These aids served his conviction that the conflict among numerous independent Greek communities could not be understood without accurate knowledge of places. (celm.folger.edu)
Behemoth applied historical explanation to the breakdown of English political authority between 1640 and 1660. Composed around 1668, it took the form of four dialogues between speakers designated A and B, combining a chronological account with questions about the causes of rebellion. Its interpretation emphasized the circulation of politically disruptive teaching: universities trained clergy, sermons transmitted doctrines to congregations, and religious claims could redirect obedience away from civil rulers. Hobbes also presented admiration for ancient republican institutions as a source of hostility to monarchy. These were arguments within his partisan explanation of the wars, rather than an impartial inventory of their causes. Charles II withheld permission for publication; an unauthorized edition nevertheless appeared in 1679, and the bookseller William Crooke issued a corrected edition in 1682, complaining of extensive errors in circulating copies. Composition, manuscript transmission, and printed publication therefore belonged to distinct stages of the work’s history. (celm.folger.edu)
The posthumously published A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (1681) similarly made an exchange between interlocutors carry a sustained polemic. Here the central target was the authority claimed for common-law learning, particularly Sir Edward Coke’s account of legal reason as an expertise perfected through generations of professional study. Hobbes’s philosopher accepted that legal knowledge required training but denied that accumulated expertise independently created binding law. The dialogue distinguished knowing the law from possessing the authority to make it: neither the wisdom of judges nor the antiquity of a practice could by itself establish legislative power. Its conversational structure allowed the student to introduce the profession’s established formulations and the philosopher to challenge their assumptions, rather than presenting the dispute solely through abstract propositions. (assets.cambridge.org)
In old age Hobbes returned to Greek epic poetry. The Voyage of Ulysses (1673) translated books 9–12 of the *Odyssey* into rhyming English verse; complete versions of both Homeric epics followed in the mid-1670s. His accompanying essay, “Concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem” (1675), made discretion, clarity, and appropriate characterization central literary concerns. Translation thus included choices about how heroic conduct should appear, not merely the substitution of English words for Greek ones. Eric Nelson’s modern edition interprets Hobbes’s treatment of Homer as an attempt to moderate politically dangerous representations of heroic conflict and insubordination; that interpretation concerns identifiable alterations in the translations, rather than an explicit political programme announced in their titles. (en.wikisource.org)
Hobbes also used Latin verse for autobiographical self-presentation. His Vita carmine expressa, composed around 1672–1673 and first printed in 1679, survives in an amanuensis’s manuscript with corrections in Hobbes’s hand. Its account of his education and intellectual career included the memorable pairing of his birth with fear during the Armada year: a crafted autobiographical image, not independent evidence for the circumstances it describes. Literary criticism and dialogue extended beyond historical and legal writing: his response to William Davenant’s Gondibert appeared in 1651, while Decameron Physiologicum (1678) organized natural-philosophical discussion into ten dialogues. These works show specific ways in which verse, conversational exposition, and controversy furnished alternatives to systematic treatise-writing. (celm.folger.edu)
Reception, Influence, and Interpretive Debates
“Hobbism” became a polemical designation rather than the name of a unified school. Critics attacked distinguishable targets: unrestricted political authority, the subordination of ecclesiastical jurisdiction to civil power, and a materialist account of human thought and action. John Bramhall’s The Catching of Leviathan (1658) charged that Hobbes’s principles undermined both Christianity and established social relationships. Hobbes’s response rejected the religious accusations and complained that Bramhall had detached conclusions from their supporting arguments. Ralph Cudworth, meanwhile, opposed Hobbesian materialism and what he understood as its atheistic implications. These objections should not be conflated: rejecting an immaterial soul, challenging clerical authority, and denying God’s existence were different positions, although contemporary controversy frequently associated them. (benjamins.com)
Hobbes’s importance to social-contract theory lies partly in establishing problems that later theorists answered differently: how naturally free and equal persons acquire political obligations, what consent authorizes, and why government deserves obedience. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689, defended government directed toward preserving natural rights, including property rights, rather than Hobbes’s unrestricted sovereign authority. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) likewise made agreement central, but located sovereignty in the citizen body and sought to reconcile obedience with freedom through the general will. Their shared contractual vocabulary therefore identifies a field of argument, not agreement about the powers or purposes of the state. (plato.stanford.edu)
A more specifically documented intellectual connection concerns Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In 1666 Leibniz explicitly endorsed Hobbes’s description of reasoning as computation, understood through addition and subtraction. Yet he criticized Hobbes’s account of names and truth, arguing that mathematical truths remain unchanged when notation changes. Leibniz also examined Hobbes’s treatment of motion and endeavour, and wrote him two letters during the 1670s; there is no evidence of replies. Later comparisons with computational approaches in philosophy of mind concern the suggestion that reasoning consists in rule-governed operations. They do not establish that Hobbes supplied a modern computational architecture or a theory of artificial intelligence. (plato.stanford.edu)
Modern disagreement about Hobbes’s ethics begins with whether his explanation of motivation entails psychological egoism—the claim that every action ultimately pursues the agent’s own good. Bernard Gert’s “Hobbes and Psychological Egoism” (1967) challenged that reading. Hobbes’s recognition of benevolence, or desire for another person’s good, supplies an important test case: concern for self-preservation does not by itself exclude other-directed desires. A separate dispute concerns the laws of nature. Prudential interpretations understand them chiefly as rational requirements for securing peace and safety; divine-command interpretations ground their binding force in God’s authority; other readings treat them as moral requirements not reducible to calculations of advantage. (research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk)
Religious interpretation intersects with, but does not settle, this dispute over obligation. A. P. Martinich’s The Two Gods of Leviathan (1992) defended a theistic interpretation, whereas Edwin Curley questioned whether Hobbes’s treatment of revelation and religious doctrine supports such a reading. The disagreement concerns how to interpret the arguments and professions contained in the texts, not an independently established verdict about private belief. Another persistent controversy concerns retained liberties under absolute government: some commentators regard subjects’ freedom to resist life-threatening commands, and the ending of obligation when protection fails, as destabilizing Hobbes’s absolutism. Others distinguish these limits on individual obligation from constitutional limits on sovereign power: a subject’s liberty to resist need not entail an institution entitled to overrule the sovereign. (academic.oup.com)
References
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- Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) — Hertford Collegehertford.ox.ac.uk
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