Thomas Hobbes
Without a state, life would be solitary, brutish and short.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679, England) : social contract and materialism. People are roughly equal: the weakest can kill the strongest. Without a common power to keep them in awe, competition, distrust and love of glory set them at war with one another. On AskPhilosophy: 5 reconstructed arguments, 4 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 5 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
He founded modern political philosophy: the state is no longer willed by God or by nature, it is made by equal individuals seeking their safety. Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Kant all think with him or against him. His "state of nature" is still a basic tool in political science, economics and game theory.
His times
A tutor in the Cavendish family, he travelled in Europe and fell in love with geometry. He lived in exile in Paris from 1640 to 1651, as England slid into civil war and then the king's execution (1649). There he mixed with Mersenne and Gassendi, criticised Descartes and taught mathematics to the future Charles II. Back in England, he was suspected of atheism all his life and died at 91.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe holds that tracing causes back, reason reaches a first eternal cause, "which men mean by the name of God". But this God is incomprehensible, and for Hobbes everything that exists is body. Many contemporaries accused him of atheism; scholars still debate his sincerity.
All thought comes first from the senses. But science is not a heap of experiences: it is rigorous reasoning from definitions, in the manner of geometry.
No reasoning gives absolute knowledge of facts. Science gives certainties, but conditional ones: "if this is, then that is".
The whole universe is body. An "incorporeal substance" is a contradiction in terms, like a round quadrangle. Sensation is nothing but motion in our organs.
Compatibilist: being free means not being hindered from doing what one wills. That does not stop every volition from having a cause, in a necessary chain.
"Good" names whatever each person desires: nothing is good simply and absolutely. But he also says the laws of nature, found by reason, are "immutable and eternal". Hence a debate: relativist, or theorist of a natural law grounded in enlightened self-interest?
We must not renounce our natural reason. But the mysteries of religion are taken like pills: swallowed whole they cure; chewed, they are cast up again. And it is the sovereign who sets public worship.
There is no utmost aim and no greatest good. The happiness of this life is an endless progress of desire, from one object to another. (He does not deny a felicity promised by God, but calls it incomprehensible.)
He denies that man is wicked by nature: our passions are not sins. But they drive us to desire "power after power" and, without a power to fear, to fight.
Order first: the sovereign must have absolute, undivided power. But his starting point is the individual and his safety: the subject stays free where the law is silent, and keeps the right to defend his life.
Moral rules are "laws of nature": conclusions of reason about what to do to preserve one's life, starting with seeking peace. An ethics of contract and enlightened self-interest.