Thomas Hobbes

English political philosopher — sovereignty and the state of nature

Tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, Earls of Devonshire · England · d. 5 April 1588 (Westport, Wiltshire) — 4 December 1679 (Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire)

Fled to Paris in November 1640 as the Long Parliament gathered, and stayed eleven years. Leviathan, published in 1651, argued that life without a common power is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and that subjects therefore authorise an absolute sovereign. He wrote it as an exile watching England destroy itself, and it remains the sharpest case for the state as artificial person.

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Record

Life: 5 April 1588 (Westport, Wiltshire) — 4 December 1679 (Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire)
Country: England
Period: Early Modern
Affiliation: Tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, Earls of Devonshire
Areas: Political philosophy, Moral philosophy, Materialism, Philosophy of science
Major works: The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640)
De Cive (1642)
Leviathan (1651)
De Corpore (1655)
Of Liberty and Necessity (1654)
De Homine (1658)
Behemoth (1681)
A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (1681)
Key concepts: The state of nature, The war of all against all, The social contract, Sovereignty, The commonwealth as artificial person, Natural right and natural law, Mechanical materialism
Influenced by: Thucydides, Euclid, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy
Wikipedia, Thomas Hobbes

Stories

Agenda

Compute, chips and the responsibility gap: artificial intelligence as geopolitics

The contest over artificial intelligence is a contest over fabrication capacity, electricity and refined minerals. Hobbes explains why states cannot trust one another about it; Kant explains why the answer was never a world government. Both run out at the same place: a killing with no author.

Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant

World Desk17 September 2026