Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)

Famous political scientist in modern times and the philosopher of mechanical materialism.

Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588, in Westport, Wiltshire, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England, into a clergy family. At the age of 14, he entered Oxford University to study classical philosophy and logic, and after graduating from the university, he served as Bacon’s secretary and in 1608, he was employed as a tutor to a noble family. From 1610 to 1637, Hobbes accompanied his students on three successive visits to the European continent, where he became acquainted with the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo and the French philosopher Gassendi. 1640, on the eve of the outbreak of the English Civil War, Hobbes went into exile in France. In Paris, Hobbes criticized the French philosopher Descartes for his dualism and theory of innate ideas. Returning to Britain in 1651, he published his main politico-philosophical work Leviathan in the same year, which systematically expounded the state doctrine of absolute monarchy. In 1655 and 1658, Hobbes published De Corpore (On the Body) and De Homine (On Man) respectively, in which he attempts to construct a philosophical theoretical system that includes three parts: the theory of the body, the theory of man, and the theory of the state, using the view of mechanical mechanics and the method of geometry.

Hobbes inherited and systematized Bacon’s materialistic empiricism, denied that God is the the substance that creates all things, and opposed Descartes’ mind-body dualism. Hobbes held that the objects of philosophical inquiry are objectively existing bodies, “a body ist that, which has no dependence upon our thought”, which is the basis of all changes in the world, that the objective world is the sum of all objects, that the basic attribute of objects is extension, i.e., possession of space, and that the world does not exist in anything other than objects with extension. It was from the materialist point of view that the world is a body that Hobbes drew the conclusion that “philosophy excludes from itself theology” and overcame the “theological incompleteness” in Bacon’s doctrine materialism. Hobbes acknowledged only the extension of the body and denied the diversity of material forms, in his view, color, sound, smell, taste and other sensory properties are not inherent in the body itself, but are only a number of subjective illusions. Hobbes held that the motion of a body is only a shift in position, i.e., the mechanical motion of “quitting of one place and the assumption of another” and denied the diversity of the forms of material motion, which has a tendency of mechanical materialism.

In his representative work of political science, Leviathan, Hobbes expounded his political philosophy in a concentrated manner. Hobbes held that before the emergence of the State and the law, society was in a “state of nature”, and since everyone was governed by the “care of oneself”, in order to preserve oneself, everyone would exclude or even eliminate others, which led to a “war of all against all” and “man to man is wolf”. For the sake of public safety and common survival, and to avoid the annihilation of mankind in the midst of killing each other, each person must give up part of his own rights, pass his rights to a “third-person” individual or assembly, and enter into a contract to be governed by it, thus giving rise to the state. But, once people entered the state of society by concluding a social contract, law and morality would emerge. Meanwhile, Hobbes emphasized the absolute personality and the absolute authority of the sovereign. Although Hobbes’ doctrine of the state served the secular royal power, his theory of absolute monarchy and theory of social contract contain the idea of “sovereignty to the people”, which had a great influence on Western political philosophy.

After the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660, Hobbes was not only treated with courtesy by his student King Charles II, but also attacked and persecuted by feudal forces represented by the church and nobility. He passed away on December 4, 1679.