Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)

The powerful intellect of Thomas Hobbes was drawn to geometry, philosophy, the classics, ethics, history, and political theory. His reputation today turns especially on his political philosophy, which boldly advanced a materialist understanding of all things, denied free will, was atheist (beneath a thin disguise), and rejoiced in making the case that human beings are radically asocial and, if left alone, will tear one another apart. Not surprisingly, his books were sometimes banned, and he was often attacked as an enemy of religion and morality.

The practical thrust of Hobbes's political thought was conservative: He defended absolute monarchy and hence criticized liberty. But this conservative thrust took its impetus from the radical views listed above, and Hobbes thus is properly credited with being one of those groundbreaking thinkers who helped introduce the modern era at the expense of the intellectual world that preceded him, one dominated by Aristotle and the Scholastic thinkers of the Roman Catholic tradition.

Notwithstanding shallow bows to the religious tradition, Hobbes roots his anthropology and his politics in a naturalistic account of man. In lieu of the Garden of Eden and divine enjoinders to seek a heavenly perfection, Hobbes discovers an original condition of man in which we “enjoy” utter liberty, but our natures drive us into ceaseless and unmitigated conflict, a war of all against all. Under such circumstances, securing our earthly preservation is our first and most powerful preoccupation. Politics is merely the most important artifice in our struggle to secure our lives: We create a powerful state, if we are prudent, to distance ourselves as far as possible from the horrors of natural anarchy. To create this state, we agree with other potential citizens to limit our liberty and support a sovereign with all our power, in the calculated expectation that the sovereign will then see that it is in his interest to protect and advance the state over which he presides. This Hobbesian version of the social contract is thus binding on citizens, not on the sovereign—a point that would occasion objections from Hobbes's followers.

The creation of an absolute sovereign requires that a large measure of our natural liberty be surrendered; but Hobbes sees this as no sacrifice at all, for our natural liberty, though vast, is utterly without value: To be free to do whatever one wants is a deadly freedom, since others enjoy it as well. Absolute freedom is absolute anarchy, and for such antisocial creatures as Hobbes's human beings, absolute anarchy results in a life, as he famously put it, that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is on the foundations of a destructive absolute natural liberty for individuals that Hobbes makes the case for absolute authority of the sovereign.

Since Hobbes did not defend individual rights against governmental authority, he does not figure prominently in discussions of the history of capitalism. He did, however, attack prior ideas about inherent value or a just price, and this prepared the way for the market to become a key measure of value. Even of a human being, for example, Hobbes said, “The ‘value' or ‘worth' of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power.” And Hobbes's attacks on loftier views of happiness or felicity paved the way for a new prominence of “acquisitive man.” Hobbes stressed, for example, that there was no such thing as “the repose of a mind satisfied.” To the contrary, happiness or “felicity” is the continual movement from a desire, to its satisfaction, to the emergence of a new desire, and so forth, ceasing only in death. Man is by nature a creature of desire and ineluctably a sort of consumer.

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