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The frontispiece of Leviathan shows a giant crowned figure rising over a landscape, his body made of hundreds of tiny people, holding a sword and a bishop's…
The frontispiece of Leviathan shows a giant crowned figure rising over a landscape, his body made of hundreds of tiny people, holding a sword and a bishop's staff: the state as an 'artificial man'. Thomas Hobbes builds his argument from the ground up, beginning with the senses, the passions and the human desire for power. Without a common power to keep them in awe, he argues, people would live in a war of every man against every man, where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'; to escape it they agree to give up their rights to a sovereign whose authority must be nearly absolute. The second half applies these ideas to religion and the Church.
Context and significance
Hobbes published the book in 1651, after the English Civil War, while living in exile in Paris, where he had taught mathematics to the future Charles II; it was accused of atheism and remains the founding work of modern political philosophy. Its great reply is John Locke's Second Treatise of Government.
About the author
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) liked to say that he was born prematurely when his mother heard that the Spanish Armada was coming, so that 'fear and I were born twins'. He spent much of his life as tutor and secretary to the aristocratic Cavendish family, met Galileo in Italy and was fascinated by geometry.
During the English Civil War he lived in exile in Paris, where he taught mathematics to the future King Charles II and wrote Leviathan (1651), arguing that only a powerful sovereign can save people from a war of all against all. He lived to ninety-one and was translating Homer in his eighties.