Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
English philosopher and political thinker Thomas Hobbes was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, the son of a vicar. At age 14 he went to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he took his bachelor's degree five years later. Thereafter, he worked as a tutor to the children of various aristocratic families.
Hobbes lived during a period of great intellectual upheaval. The Aristotelian system of thought was being challenged, and new ideas in philosophy and science were being proposed in its place. Hobbes travelled extensively, meeting or corresponding with leading scientific and philosophical figures of the time, including Bacon, Descartes and Galileo. Hobbes was involved in developing many aspects of the new systems of thought, and had active interests in geometry, physics and psychology, as well as philosophy and politics.
This was also a period of great political upheaval in England. A growing dissatisfaction with the rule of the monarch led to a struggle for power between the king and the parliament, culminating in civil war and the execution of King Charles I (1649). Hobbes was always a staunch supporter of the monarchy, and spent the years 1640 to 1651 in exile in France out of fear for his life.
His most famous work, Leviathan, published in 1651, is a defence of absolute monarchy. It was unusual for the time in that the defence didn't rest on an appeal to God and the divine right to rule, but instead was based on a prudential argument. Hobbes argued that without a monarch with absolute power to impose laws, people would constantly be attacking on another, and life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". This is essentially the "prisoner's dilemma" argument we examined in the main text.
Hobbes lived to the age of 91, and his other intellectual output is too broad and varied to go into here.