Thomas Hobbes (Tayla Skidgel)
Born in Malmesbury, England on April 5, 1588, Thomas Hobbes would later become one of the 17th Century’s most prominent political philosophers. A graduate of Oxford University, he began tutoring the eventual earl of Devonshire—William Cavendish—in 1608. Hobbes and Cavendish even toured parts of Europe together in 1610, preluding the patronship that the Cavendish family would give Hobbes for the rest of his life. Years later, Hobbes returned to tutor his deceased friend’s son, during which time he visited Europe again and met fellow philosopher Rene Descartes and astronomer Galileo Galilei.
As civil war loomed in England in 1640, Hobbes grew increasingly uneasy about the Long Parliament’s reception of his writing and Royalist sentiments. He took refuge in Paris for eleven years and tutored the future king of England, Charles II, for two of those years.
Hobbes’s most renowned, most controversial book Leviathan; or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil was released in 1651. His provocative views regarding government and the Roman Catholic Church were not popular with French authorities and he fled to England within the same year. Hobbes lauded the social contract, arguing that humankind must bow down to a central authority—ideally an absolute monarch who heads a national religion—in order to overcome innate violence and fear. While introducing Rochester’s “A Satire against Reason and Mankind,” our textbook states that the speaker is a “natural man” who embraces “Hobbes’s doctrine that all laws, even our notions of good and evil, are artificial social checks on natural human desires.”
Hobbes’s views, however, continued to incite action against him in England; Parliament investigated Leviathan for atheist sympathies in 1666. Hobbes managed to evade serious penalties, largely due to intervention from King Charles II, but he never publicized explicitly political topics again.
Hobbes kept writing well into his eighties. He finished an autobiography in 1672, which he wrote entirely in Latin verse. From 1675 to 1676, he translated the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad” into English. Hobbes died on December 4, 1679 at the age of ninety-one.
Main source:
Supplemental source:
Page 2297 of Lipking, Lawrence and James Noggle. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. c: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012.
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