Thomas Hobbes
Pre-reading
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the greatest English philosophers and political theorists, and one of the central figures of British empiricism. Hobbes studied at Oxford, where he learnt a contempt for the philosophy of Plato and, especially, Aristotle that stayed for life. After graduation, he joined the family of the Earls(later Dukes) of Devonshire as a tutor and traveled with his pupil in Europe, where he engaged Galileo in philosophical discussions on the nature of motion.
He later turned to political theory, but his support for absolutism put him at odds with the rising antiroyalist sentiment of the time. He fled to Paris in 1640, where he tutored the future King Charles Ⅱ of England. In Paris he wrote his best-known work, Leviathan(1651), in which he attempted to justify the absolute power of the sovereign on the basis of a hypothetical social contract in which individuals seek to protect themselves from one another by agreeing to obey the sovereign in all matters. Hobbes held that the greatest threat to human security was the anarchy of the “State of Nature”, and that to avoid that horrific condition, where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, and men must contract to establish a sovereign power with sufficient authority to enforce laws and maintain order.
Hobbes returned to Britain in 1651 after the death of Charles Ⅰ. In 1666 Parliament threatened to investigate him as an atheist. His works are considered important statements of the nascent ideas of liberalism as well as of the longstanding assumptions of absolutism characteristic of the times.
Prompts for Your Reading
1.What are the characteristics of the so-called political creatures?
2.What are the six differences between human beings and political creatures?
3.For what purposes does the author compare humans and political creatures?
4.What are the functions of the common power?
5.What is a Commonwealth?