422 THOMASHOBBES
In 1628, Hobbes published his first literary work: a translation of
Thucydides, by which he hoped to use history to enlighten the English people.
In Thucydides’Peloponnesian War,democratic Athens had been defeated by
monarchical Sparta. Hobbes wanted to warn his fellow citizens of the creeping
democracy threatening England. Hobbes was convinced that democracy led to
chaos and that a strong central government was essential for national stability.
In 1640, Hobbes was forced to flee England for Paris when the Long
Parliament supplanted the king. In Paris, Hobbes wrote the book for which he
is famous,Leviathan or the Matter,Form,and Power of a Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil. The book was published between the execution of
Charles I (1649) and the Protectorate of Cromwell (1653), a time ripe for polit-
ical philosophy.
Cromwell permitted Hobbes to return to England in 1652. Although Hobbes
had always been a royalist, his argument for the absolute power of the sovereign
was not restricted to kings. Thus Cromwell had no reason to consider Hobbes’s
doctrine seditious—nor did Charles II, whom Hobbes had tutored in Paris, and
who was later restored to the monarchy.
Hobbes’s later years were spent writing and arguing for his ideas. Although he
continued to have enemies, with the king’s friendship he managed to stay out of
serious trouble. In his early eighties, Hobbes wrote a history of the period 1640 to
1660, which he called Behemoth. When he was 84, Hobbes published his autobi-
ography in Latin verse; at 86, he produced a verse translation of both the Iliadand
the Odyssey(for lack of anything better to do, he commented). He died in 1679 at
the age of 91.
The Leviathanis known primarily for its political philosophy, but it touches on a
number of other issues including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and religion.
Hobbes begins with a thoroughgoing version of materialism. Everything in the
world, including humans, consists of bodies in motion. Knowledge of the world
begins in sensation. Bodies in motion outside of a person cause motion within the
person. Memories, imagination, and other “mental” phenomena are the after-
shocks of sensations—what Hobbes calls “decaying sense.”Willingis that
“beginning of motion” that leads to action when individuals move and so move
other bodies.
Using a mechanistic explanation of “voluntary motions,” which he calls
“endeavors,” Hobbes believes that in human life, self-interest and the desire for
power are the basic motive powers. According to Hobbes, each person constantly
seeks an advantage over everyone else. Yet since all are born equal, there is no
inherent reason why one person should give way to another. The result is what
Hobbes calls “a war of every man against every man...[in which] the notions of
right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place.” In such an environment, life
is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
To avoid this natural state of anarchy, individuals must enter into a social
contract or covenant with all other individuals to give up their power irrevoca-
bly to a sovereign: “This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather,
to speak more reverently, of that ‘mortal god,’ to which we owe under the
‘immortal God,’ our peace and defence.” This contract is not binding on the
