in line. Rational citizens will recognize the advantage
of social peace and give obedience to the government.
Hobbes allows the state to regulate PROPERTY, censor
speech and press, dictate jobs and residence—every
aspect of society but killing the subjects, whom it was
created to protect. So, this early philosophical liberal-
ism does not allow individuals to retain many natural
rights (as later, John LOCKE, John Stuart MILL,or
Thomas JEFFERSON do), but Hobbes insists that this
absolute authority is necessary to preserve social order.
He ridicules “those democratical writers” who want to
limit the power of the state, comparing their minds to
the diseased madness of rabies. Any brutal authority is
preferable to the “war of all against all” in the state of
nature, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short.” It is thought that Hobbes’s experience of the
disorder of the English civil wars led to a paranoid fear
of freedom and ANARCHY.
Because of its authoritarian conclusions, Hobbes’s
political theory was soon out of favor, but his material-
ist premises continued to inform democratic liberalism
and behaviorist social science. Most significant was
Hobbes’s materialistic influence on Modern ethical rel-
ativism. If all ethical value judgments are derived from
knowledge, and all knowledge is from private sensory
experience, definitions of goodand evilare all personal
and vary by individual. If one person takes pleasure in
eating dirt, no universal moral standard can obviate
that preference. Hobbes’s scientific morality bases all
ethical decisions in individual senses and choice, with-
out any overriding definition of rightand wrong(from
the community in ARISTOTLE, the church in St. Thomas
AQUINAS, God in John CALVIN, the Bible in Martin
LUTHER). This leads in Modern EGALITARIANdemocratic
society to ethical relativism, where no shared common
moral vision exists over the whole society. It develops
into what James HUNTERcalls the PROGRESSIVEmindset
in contemporary United States.
Thomas Hobbes was born into a lower-middle-class
family in England; his father abandoned the family
when Thomas was young. He attended Oxford and
served as tutor to the noble Devonshire family, which
allowed him to travel to the intellectual centers of
Europe (Paris, Venice). His main book in political phi-
losophy is The Leviathan(1651). For its atheistic ideas,
it was banned by the British Parliament and blamed,
with other sacrilegious books, for God’s wrath in the
Great Fire of London in 1666. Hobbes’s ideas offended
both REPUBLICAN Parliamentarians (who wanted the
state to be less absolutist) and royalist monarchists
(who wanted to base their legitimacy in DIVINE RIGHT
OF KINGS). Despite his unpopularity, Hobbes enjoyed a
long life and had a worldwide reputation for his intel-
lectual activities.Further Readings
Brown, K. C., ed. Hobbes Studies.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1965.
Goldsmith, M. M. Hobbes’s Science of Politics.New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1966.
Warrender, H. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.Oxford, Eng.:
Oxford University Press, 1957.
Watkins, J. W. N. Hobbes’s System of Ideas.London: Hutchinson,
1973.Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney (1864–1929)
English writer and sociologist
During his distinguished career, Leonard Trelawney
Hobhouse produced a number of works that detailed
the basis for the MODERN LIBERALmovement. Hobhouse
became a sociologist after initially teaching philosophy
and writing for the Manchester Guardian.In addition to
his political works, Hobhouse also wrote extensively
on the development of scientific thought and human
REASONING.
Hobhouse was born in St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1864.
He was educated at Marlborough and studied classics
at Corpus Christi College at Oxford. In 1890, Hob-
house became an assistant tutor at Oxford, where he
taught philosophy; he was eventually elected a fellow
of Corpus Christi College. At Oxford, Hobhouse began
to study the trade union movement. This sparked an
interest in sociology, which led the young scholar to
abandon philosophy for the social sciences. Hob-
house’s first scholarly monograph, The Labour Move-
ment (1893), reflected his newfound interest. This
work was followed by another sociological piece, The
Theory of Knowledge(1896).
In 1897, Hobhouse began to write for the Manches-
ter Guardian. He ultimately became responsible for
writing the newspaper’s lead articles. While at this
post, he also produced two important books, Mind in
Evolution(1901) and Democracy and Reaction(1904).
Mind in Evolutiondemonstrated Hobhouse’s keen intel-
lectual abilities. He studied the major stages of human
mental development and concluded that evolution did
not automatically imply PROGRESStoward greater men-
tal performance. Instead, evolution marked a diffusion
of knowledge and widening of scope, including the
emergence of self-consciousness.142 Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney