Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), born at Malmesbury (supposedly frightened before his birth by the approach of the Spanish Armada) and educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. Like John Milton, he travelled to the European continent and met Galileo Galilei, Descartes and Mersenne. Briefly worked as mathematical tutor to the exiled King Charles II, but returned to England and submitted to the Commonwealth regime in 1652. Got a pension after the Restoration in 1660.

Known as influential political philosopher, most famously for The Leviathan (1651).

Leviathan, or the matter, form and power of a common wealth ecclesiastical and civil

The title of this text is a reference to the book of Job in the bible ("Hiob" in German). There, 'leviathan' denotes a sea monster of which is said that there is no power on earth which is comparable to its power. Hobbes uses the leviathan as a symbol of the political power of the state which alone is able to establish peace and security among men.

Hobbes' view was influenced not only by the power struggle between king and Parliament, but also by the civil wars of his time, which were mainly religiously motivated. From these circumstances, Hobbes draws the following (quite memorable...) conclusion that religion is unsuitable to establish a reliable political order. This task is now to be fulfilled by political philosophy. Therefore, the philosopher Wolfgang Kersting calls the philosophy (as instrumentalised by Hobbes) a "Friedenswissenschaft" (Kersting 44), i.e. the philosopher has to set up principles upon which a political system can be successfully built.

Hobbes starts out from a state of nature, in which men behave like wolves against each other, driven by fear and desire. This state of nature is the result of a thought experiment: to find out how the state works and how a political system is to be established, Hobbes disintegrates the states of its components, i.e. its legal system and conventions. What cannot be dissolved or disintegrated and therefore remains is the individual.

Following the rules of his (i.e. Hobbesian) logic, man acts like an animal if bereft of rules and regulations. He pursues what Hobbes calls his right to everything. However, the strongest passion of this animal is its fear of death. Consequently, man has a strong instinct of self-preservation and he understands that in the lawless state of nature, "his right to everything is a right to nothing" (Lev, 13), i.e. it is very likely that he will lose all his gains as soon as another person longs for the same as he does. Thus he realizes that he has to leave this state of nature if he wants to lead a life worth living.

This is where the Leviathan comes in: human beings leave the state of nature via concluding a contract with each other to give over their power (their right to everything) to one person or an assembly of persons (for fear of tiresome discussions and quarrels - as seen in Parliament - Hobbes favours the single-person-solution). This person/ assembly thus becomes the Leviathan, or the mortal God. However, although every man agrees in a contract to transfer his power to the Leviathan, this Leviathan himself is only the benefactor of this contract and no party to this agreement. Otherwise he would not have have the absolute power which is necessary to secure peace among his subjects and to enforce laws.

sources:

Oxford Companion to Literature

Longer Biography available on Luminarium.org [1]

Kersting, Wolfgang: Thomas Hobbes, Hamburg: Junius 2004.

Röd, Wolfgang: Der Weg der Philosophie, Hamburg: [Publishing House?] 1996.