Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) advocated by
Lisa Jardine
Listen to Lisa Jardine say why you should vote for Thomas Hobbes'[In] this war of every man against every man; nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.'
Hobbes's political philosophy dominated the seventeenth century. He was a royalist and spent much of the period of the English Civil War in exile in France where he was tutor to the Prince of Wales.
It was the political unrest of the English Civil War that provoked his greatest work -
The Leviathan (1651). In it he argued that man was a savage creature disposed to conflict and driven by two impulses, a desire for power and a fear of death.
Left to its own devices, what Hobbes called the 'state of nature', mankind would undertake a "war of everyone against everyone" in which individual lives would be "solitary, nasty, brutish and short".
Hobbes solution was strong government, the leviathan of his title, against which individuals had no rights and no authority.
This seems authoritarian but Hobbes argued that the leviathan's authority derives from a social contract with the people it governs. They assent to it because it curbs their inherent violence and therefore acts in their best interest - the alternative is a lapse back into the violent state of nature.
Hobbes was a royalist and felt a monarchy to be the ideal leviathan but he was attacked by other royalists for undermining the divine right of Kings which claimed that kingly authority derived from God. For Hobbes, authority ultimate derived from the people.
Hobbes other famous works include
The Elements of Law (1650);
De Cive (1642);
De Corpore (1655); and
De Homine (1658) and
Behemoth (1682).
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes on
Project GutenbergRead about Thomas Hobbes on WikipediaRead about Thomas Hobbes on the Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyRead about Thomas Hobbes on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Please note: the BBC accepts no responsibility for the content of external websites.
Listen to Lisa Jardine say why you should vote for Thomas Hobbes
Lisa Jardine
Lisa Jardine is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. As well as holding her academic position Lisa is a writer, critic and broadcaster and is ex-chairman of the Booker Prize panel. Lisa Jardine's books include: The Curious Life of Robert Hooke (2003); On A Grander Scale: The Career of Christopher Wren (2002); Ingenious Pursuits; Building the Scientific Revolution (1999); Worldly Goods; A New History of the Renaissance (1996) and Erasmus, Man of Letters (1993).
