Thomas (1588–1679), English philosopher whose writings, especially the English version of Leviathan (1651), strongly influenced all of subsequent English moral and political philosophy. He also wrote a trilogy comprising De Cive (1642; English version, Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1651), De Corpore (On the Body, 1655), and De Homine (On Man, 1658). Together with Leviathan (the revised Latin version of which was published in 1668), these are his major philosophical works. However, an early draft of his thoughts, The Elements of Law, Natural and Political (also known as Human Nature and De Corpore Politico), was published without permission in 1650. Many of the misinterpretations of Hobbes’s views on human nature come from mistaking this early work as representing his mature views.
Hobbes was influential not only in England, but also on the Continent. He is the author of the third set of objections to Descartes’s Meditations. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus was deeply influenced by Hobbes, not only in its political views but also in the way it dealt with Scripture. Hobbes was not merely a philosopher; he was mathematical tutor to Charles II and also a classical scholar. His first published work was a translation of Thucydides (1628), and among his latest, about a half-century later, were translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Hobbes’s philosophical views have a remarkably contemporary sound. In metaphysics, he holds a strong materialist view, sometimes viewing mental phenomena as epiphenomenal, but later moving toward a reductive or eliminative view. In epistemology he held a sophisticated empiricism, which emphasized the importance of language for knowledge. If not the originator of the contemporary compatibilist view of the relationship between free will and determinism (see The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, 1656), he was one of the primary influences. He also was one of the most important philosophers of language, explicitly noting that language is used not only to describe the world but to express attitudes and, performatively, to make promises and contracts.
One of Hobbes’s outstanding characteristics is his intellectual honesty. Though he may have been timid (he himself claims that he was, explaining that his mother gave birth to him because of fright over the coming of the Spanish Armada), his writing shows no trace of it. During more than half his long lifetime he engaged in many philosophical controversies, which required considerably more courage in Hobbes’s day than at present. Both the Roman Catholic church and Oxford University banned the reading of his books and there was talk not only of burning his books but of burning Hobbes himself.
An adequate interpretation of Hobbes requires careful attention to his accounts of human nature, reason, morality, and law. Although he was not completely consistent, his moral and political philosophy is remarkably coherent. His political theory is often thought to require an egoistic psychology, whereas it actually requires only that most persons be concerned with their own self-interest, especially their own preservation. It does not require that most not be concerned with other persons as well. All that Hobbes denies is an undifferentiated natural benevolence: ‘For if by nature one man should love another (that is) as man, there could no reason be returned why every man should not equally love every man, as being equally man.’ His argument is that limited benevolence is not an adequate foundation upon which to build a state. Hobbes’s political theory does not require the denial of limited benevolence, he indeed includes benevolence in his list of the passions in Leviathan: ‘Desire of good to another, BENEVO- LENCE, GOOD WILL, CHARITY. If to man generally, GOOD NATURE.’ Psychological egoism not only denies benevolent action, it also denies action done from a moral sense, i.e., action done because one believes it is the morally right thing to do. But Hobbes denies neither kind of action. But when the words [‘just’ and ‘unjust’] are applied to persons, to be just signifies as much as to be delighted in just dealing, to study how to do righteousness, or to endeavor in all things to do that which is just; and to be unjust is to neglect righteous dealing, or to think it is to be measured not according to my contract, but some present benefit. Hobbes’s pessimism about the number of just people is primarily due to his awareness of the strength of the passions and his conviction that most people have not been properly educated and disciplined. Hobbes is one of the few philosophers to realize that to talk of that part of human nature which involves the passions is to talk about human populations. He says, ‘though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet because we cannot distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting, heeding, anticipating, subjugating, self-defending, ever incident to the most honest and fairest conditioned.’ Though we may be aware of small communities in which mutual trust and respect make law enforcement unnecessary, this is never the case when we are dealing with a large group of people. Hobbes’s point is that if a large group of people are to live together, there must be a common power set up to enforce the rules of the society. That there is not now, nor has there ever been, any large group of people living together without such a common power is sufficient to establish his point. Often overlooked is Hobbes’s distinction between people considered as if they were simply animals, not modified in any way by education or discipline, and civilized people. Though obviously an abstraction, people as animals are fairly well exemplified by children. ‘Unless you give children all they ask for, they are peevish, and cry, aye and strike their parents sometimes; and all this they have from nature.’ In the state of nature, people have no education or training, so there is ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ But real people have been brought up in families; they are, at least to some degree, civilized persons, and how they will behave depends on how they are brought up. Hobbes does not say that society is a collection of misfits and that this is why we have all the trouble that we do – a position congenial to the psychological egoist. But he does acknowledge that ‘many also (perhaps most men) either through defect of mind, or want of education, remain unfit during the whole course of their lives; yet have they, infants as well as those of riper years, a human nature; wherefore man is made fit for society not by nature, but by education.’ Education and training may change people so that they act out of genuine moral motives. That is why it is one of the most important functions of the sovereign to provide for the proper training and education of the citizens. In the current debate between nature and nurture, on the question of behavior Hobbes would come down strongly on the side of nurture.
Hobbes’s concept of reason has more in common with the classical philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle, where reason sets the ends of behavior, than with the modern tradition stemming from Hume where the only function of reason is to discover the best means to ends set by the passions. For Hobbes, reason is very complex; it has a goal, lasting selfpreservation, and it seeks the way to this goal. It also discovers the means to ends set by the passions, but it governs the passions, or tries to, so that its own goal is not threatened. Since its goal is the same in all people, it is the source of rules applying to all people. All of this is surprisingly close to the generally accepted account of rationality. We generally agree that those who follow their passions when they threaten their life are acting irrationally. We also believe that everyone always ought to act rationally, though we know that few always do so. Perhaps it was just the closeness of Hobbes’s account of reason to the ordinary view of the matter that has led to its being so completely overlooked.
The failure to recognize that the avoidance of violent death is the primary goal of reason has distorted almost all accounts of Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy, yet it is a point on which Hobbes is completely clear and consistent. He explicitly says that reason ‘teaches every man to fly a contra-natural dissolution [mortem violentam] as the greatest mischief that can arrive to nature.’ He continually points out that it is a dictate of right reason to seek peace when possible because people cannot ‘expect any lasting preservation continuing thus in the state of nature, that is, of war.’ And he calls temperance and fortitude precepts of reason because they tend to one’s preservation. It has not generally been recognized that Hobbes regarded it as an end of reason to avoid violent death because he often talks of the avoidance of death in a way that makes it seem merely an object of a passion. But it is reason that dictates that one take all those measures necessary for one’s preservation; peace if possible, if not, defense. Reason’s dictates are categorical; it would be a travesty of Hobbes’s view to regard the dictates of reason as hypothetical judgments addressed to those whose desire for their own preservation happens to be greater than any conflicting desire. He explicitly deplores the power of the irrational appetites and expressly declares that it is a dictate of reason that one not scorn others because ‘most men