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Hobbes, Thomas
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Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)

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Title page of Hobbes's Leviathan or the matter, form, and power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote this treatise in 1651, believing that without the fear inherent in absolute rule, the natural state of the human race is selfish and moved only by a need for power.

English political philosopher and the first thinker since Aristotle to attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of nature, including human behaviour. In Leviathan (1651), he advocates absolutist government as the only means of ensuring order and security; he saw this as deriving from the social contract.

Hobbes analysed everything, including human behaviour, in terms of matter and motion. He is now best remembered for his political philosophy, in which he defended absolute sovereignty as the only way to prevent life from being ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, as he alleged it was in a state of nature. He based this absolute sovereignty on a social contract among individuals, but the sovereign has duties only to God.



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Brokering some kind of workable constitutional arrangement among Shi'a, Sunnis and Kurds was never going to be easy, but it is almost guaranteed to fail against a backdrop of relentless Hobbesian mayhem.
Baghdad or bust by Rosen, Gary / The National Interest
28) It does so because its metaphysics drives it relentlessly toward an intellectual universe in which the only moral norm--if it can be called that--is something akin to the Hobbesian right of nature, an intellectual universe in which "every man has a right to everything.
Christianity, Enlightenment liberalism, and the quest for freedom by Grasso, Kenneth L. / Modern Age
Geraldine Brooks, the Australian writer whose novel, March, won this year's Pulitzer Prize, transports us to a Hobbesian world where life was indeed nasty, brutish, and short--a seventeenth-century English village, besieged by bubonic plague, whose residents quarantine themselves from the world in order to halt the spread of a disease they see as a mark of God's wrath.
Summer Reading by O'Connor, Lauretta / Commonweal
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