Thomas Hobbes
1588–1679 · England
“The life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Thomas Hobbes
Drew From(4)
who shaped Thomas Hobbes
- Leviathan's state of nature begins here — Hobbes translated the History into English himself, and never shook it off
- Read the Melian Dialogue and you've read Hobbes's politics in embryo: power, fear, and the brutal logic of "the strong rule the weak"
- The collapse of order Thucydides records at Corcyra is the disaster Leviathan is engineered to prevent
via The Republic
- Leviathan names its ancestor outright — Hobbes invokes "the Commonwealth of Plato" in chapter 31 and ties his hope to Plato's own
- Both books are blueprints for the just commonwealth, and both end at the same wager: order depends on the right kind of ruler
- The Republic's philosopher-king stands behind Hobbes's sovereign — reading Plato first shows you the lineage Hobbes is consciously joining
via Deuteronomy
- Leviathan's Part 3 turns on Deuteronomy — Hobbes quotes its own words ("no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day") to argue the Pentateuch was finished long after Moses
- He builds his sovereign on "Moses' seat" and the Mosaic covenant, and reads the "volume of the law" of Deuteronomy 11–27 as the model for law given by a single authority
- Read Deuteronomy first and you see exactly what Hobbes is dismantling — and rebuilding — when he gets to scripture
- Leviathan defines itself against Aristotle — Hobbes quotes the "old moral philosophers" only to reject their highest good by name
- Where the Ethics makes happiness a single complete end, Hobbes makes it restless, endless desire, and rejects the political-animal premise for a war of all against all
- Read Aristotle first and Hobbes's opening moves snap into focus as a deliberate refutation
Inspired(1)
who Thomas Hobbes shaped
via Ethics
- Hobbes's mechanistic picture of human nature — every creature driven by the striving to persist in its own being — passed straight into Spinoza
- Spinoza had Hobbes on his shelf (a Latin De Cive, and access to Leviathan) and built it into the bones of his system
- But he turned the engine the other way: where Leviathan uses the striving self to justify an all-powerful sovereign, the Ethics uses it to argue toward freedom
Famous Quotes
“And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
“The condition of man is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”
“Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”
“Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.”
About Thomas Hobbes
English philosopher, best known for his political treatise Leviathan, which argued for a powerful sovereign authority to prevent the 'war of all against all.' His materialist philosophy and social contract theory made him one of the founders of modern political philosophy. He lived to 91, surviving civil war and exile.