One more thing comes to mind. Quentin Skinner once noted that the 17th century, particularly the period from 1640 to 1650, was a critical time for the development of modern political theory. The key authors we will discuss today are Thomas Hobbes, with his work Leviathan (1651), and John Locke, with Two Treatises of Government (published in 1689).
During the Reformation, the understanding of secular rulers and obedience to them changed dramatically. We discussed how Luther’s initial position—absolute obedience to rulers ordained by God—evolved into the idea that a ruler who violated divine or natural law lost their legitimacy. For Calvinists, this shift meant not only a right to resist such rulers, but a religious duty to do so.
Over time, these debates gradually moved from a theological basis to a more secular, legal one. By the 17th century, thinkers like Hobbes and Locke were transforming these older ideas into something fundamentally new: theories of government based on social contracts and natural rights.
Another crucial development was the mechanistic view of human nature. Hobbes’s main work, Leviathan (1651), presents the state as an artificial construct—a man-made entity created through social contracts, not ordained by God. This was a radical departure from traditional, divinely-centered political theories.
Today, we begin with Hobbes’s ethics, which forms the foundation of his political philosophy.
His understanding of human nature, desire, and the origins of moral concepts is essential to grasp before we move on to his political theory. In our next session, we’ll explore his theory of the social contract and the political ideas that made Leviathan one of the most influential works in the history of political thought.
Thomas Hobbes: A Life in Turbulent Times
He was born prematurely on April 15, 1588, in Malmesbury — and no one could have predicted the eminence he would later attain. Hobbes’s father, also named Thomas, was an ignorant and alcoholic clergyman. After a brawl with another clergyman, he fled Malmesbury toward London and vanished from the historical record. This occurred around the same time young Hobbes was preparing to leave for Magdalen Hall, Oxford. His education was financed by his uncle Francis, a successful glover.
Hobbes was precocious. He began school at the age of four and had already mastered Latin, Greek, and arithmetic before setting off for Oxford (Martinich, p. 4).
He graduated in February 1608 and was soon hired by William Cavendish to tutor his son, also named William. Beyond tutoring, Hobbes became a close companion to the family, frequently traveling with them. Throughout his life, Hobbes served as a tutor to several noble families, most notably the Cavendishes. This role gave him the chance to travel extensively across the European continent with his students, immersing himself in intellectual circles and engaging in scientific debates.
During these travels, Hobbes encountered some of the leading thinkers of the time, including Galileo Galilei and René Descartes — encounters that deeply influenced his philosophical development.
It was likely during one of these Continental journeys that Hobbes came across Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean theorem. The clarity and precision of geometry, and natural science more broadly, inspired him to model his own philosophy on similar rigorous foundations.
He is known to have had a daughter, though he never married — believing that a man in his social and professional position was not conveniently placed to support a family.
The 1650s were likely the most successful years of Hobbes’s life. He was safe, well-regarded, and widely read in England. However, the 1660s and 1670s brought increasing frustration, as Hobbes found himself embroiled in numerous disputes with leading churchmen, scientists, and mathematicians. One notable conflict was with Robert Boyle, a prominent member of the Royal Society, over the nature of the vacuum. By the mid-1670s, Hobbes had grown weary of these intellectual battles. In 1675, he left London for quieter surroundings. During this period, he completed translations of both Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. He died on December 4, 1679, after a long illness.
Hobbes and Descartes
Hobbes had significant philosophical disagreements with René Descartes, particularly regarding the nature of thought and reasoning. For instance, Hobbes rejected Descartes’ famous inference from “I am thinking” to “I exist.” He argued that this was not a result of some intuitive, direct self-awareness, but rather a consequence of the human inability “to conceive of an act without a subject.” In other words, Hobbes believed Descartes failed to distinguish clearly between the subject and its properties.
Another issue Hobbes took with Descartes was his understanding of reasoning. Hobbes argued — and would later emphasize more explicitly — that reasoning is not a process of discovering truths about the world, but rather “simply the joining together and linking of names.” Since names are arbitrary labels that humans assign to things, Hobbes believed reasoning does not reveal the nature of things themselves, but only the relationships between the labels we attach to them.
(Martinich, p. 9)
One of the most important differences between Hobbes and Descartes concerns the human capacity to know God. For Hobbes — who believed that all ideas ultimately derive from sensation — we can have virtually no knowledge of God, since God is never an object of our senses. This stands in sharp contrast to Descartes, for whom the idea of God plays a central role in securing the certainty of knowledge.
They also fundamentally disagreed about the concept of the infinite. Hobbes claimed that to be infinite is something he cannot “conceive or imagine any supposed limits” to — highlighting the limits of human understanding when it comes to abstract notions. Descartes, by contrast, held that the idea of the infinite (particularly as it pertains to God) is innate and central to rational thought.
It’s no surprise, then, that the two thinkers struggled to engage meaningfully with each other. Hobbes was an unwavering monist and materialist, committed to explaining everything in physical terms, while Descartes was a dualist and rationalist, defending a sharp distinction between mind and body, and trusting reason above all.
On Man
Hobbes observes that life is nothing more than the motion of limbs. He then asks: can we not say that automata — machines moved by springs and wheels, like clocks — have artificial life? He continues: what is the heart but a spring? The nerves but strings? The joints but wheels that transmit motion through the body, according to the will of its master?
And from this mechanical vision of life, Hobbes makes his bold leap:
“For by art is created that great Leviathan, which is called a Commonwealth or State (in Latin, Civitas), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural man, for whose protection and defense it was intended.”
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (1651), Introduction.
This is how Leviathan begins.
The first part of Hobbes’s work, devoted not directly to politics but to human nature, is titled Of Man. This choice is significant. For Hobbes, understanding politics requires first a clear understanding of human beings — their desires, fears, and drives. Only then can one construct a political system that accounts for those realities.
Hobbes’s approach was groundbreaking. He aimed to create a science of political philosophy. As Quentin Skinner observes, Hobbes modeled his theory of absolute sovereignty on Euclidean geometry, deducing political conclusions from carefully defined premises:
“Absolute sovereignty was a genuine kind of government, deduced like theorems in geometry from carefully formulated definitions.”
(Skinner, Freedom Before Liberalism, 2006, p. 2)
Origins of Ethics: What Is “Good” and “Bad”?
In Leviathan, Chapter 1 (Of Sense), Hobbes begins his philosophical project with a fundamental question: What is the origin of thought? He writes:
“Concerning the thoughts of man… the origin of them all is that which we call sense; for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense.”
According to Hobbes, the cause of sense is an external body or object acting on our sensory organs — through touch, hearing, or sight. He distinguishes two types of motion in animals. Vital motions, like blood circulation and digestion, begin at birth. They continue unconsciously throughout life. Voluntary motions, like walking or speaking, result from conscious decision-making.
These voluntary actions begin in the mind. Hobbes claims they start with imagination — a residual motion in the brain. This motion is left behind after a sensory experience. In this framework, all voluntary movement originates in sensory stimulation. Thought itself, then, is nothing more than a sequence of internal motions caused by external physical objects.
This is the foundation of Hobbes’s materialist theory of mind. There are no innate ideas, no knowledge revealed by God, and no supernatural truths imprinted on the soul. Every idea we possess is formed by the physical world acting on our sensory apparatus. Human understanding, according to Hobbes, is fully rooted in material causes.
From this theory of sense and imagination, Hobbes proceeds to his ethics, elaborated in Leviathan, Chapter 6 (Of the Passions). He writes:
“Good. Evil. The man calls good whatever is the object of his appetite or desire. The object of his hate and aversion is called evil, and the object of his contempt is called vile and inconsiderable.
The words ‘good,’ ‘evil,’ and ‘contemptible’ are always used in relation to the person that uses them. There is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor is the common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.”
In other words, good and evil are not objective properties of things. They are subjective judgments based on the desires and aversions of individuals. What one person finds desirable, another may find hateful. Good is what we are drawn toward; evil is what we try to avoid.
He further defines passions in these terms:
- Hope: Appetite with the opinion of attaining its object.
- Despair: Appetite without such an opinion.
- Fear: Aversion coupled with the opinion of receiving harm.
- Courage: Aversion with hope of overcoming the harm by resistance.
- Anger: Sudden courage.
- Confidence: Constant hope in oneself.
- Diffidence: Constant despair in oneself.
For Hobbes, pleasure is the feeling of something good. Pain, or displeasure, is the feeling of something evil.All desire is accompanied by pleasure, all aversion by pain.Ethics — our sense of right and wrong — doesn’t come from religion or pure reason. It comes from how our bodies react to the world.
Hobbes’s ethics are deeply materialist: good and bad come not from scripture or tradition, but from nature and sense experience. Our passions are part of our biology, and our moral judgments are grounded in experience, not abstraction.
Image Information
Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651)
- Artist: Abraham Bosse
- Design by: Thomas Hobbes
- Published: 1651, London
- Image Source: Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
- License: Public Domain (no copyright restrictions)
Leave a Reply