Thomas Hobbes Biography Quotes 34 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 in Westport, a parish of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England. He later remarked that his mother gave birth prematurely when frightened by news of the approaching Spanish Armada, saying that fear and he were born twins. His father, a clergyman of modest means, disappeared from the family after a quarrel, and Hobbes was raised largely under the care of his uncle, Francis Hobbes. He received his early schooling locally and distinguished himself for his aptitude in languages and classical studies. In 1603 he entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where the scholastic curriculum left him dissatisfied; he would later criticize the Aristotelian framework that dominated English universities. Even so, Oxford gave him a grounding in logic and rhetoric, and he left with the skills that first secured his livelihood and then supported his philosophical ambitions.

Patronage and First Steps as a Scholar
In 1608 Hobbes entered the service of the Cavendish family, a connection that would sustain him for the rest of his life. He became tutor and companion to William Cavendish, who later became the 2nd Earl of Devonshire, and through this role gained access to a great house renowned for its libraries and connections. The Cavendishes sponsored his travels on the Continent, where he encountered new intellectual currents that profoundly shaped his thought. He also moved among prominent figures in England, including Francis Bacon, whose program for a new, methodical science influenced Hobbes even when he took different paths. Hobbes occasionally assisted Bacon as an amanuensis, and while their methods diverged, Bacon's emphasis on clarity, method, and the critique of scholasticism resonated with him.

Hobbes's first major publication was his 1629 English translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War. He admired Thucydides as a keen analyst of faction and civil conflict, and the translation carried a preface that implicitly warned his contemporaries about the dangers of popular turbulence. The choice of author, and the political lesson Hobbes drew from him, foreshadowed the themes he would develop with greater system and audacity in his later works.

Continental Networks and the Turn to Science
In the 1630s Hobbes traveled extensively in France and Italy, deepening his engagement with mathematics and natural philosophy. In Paris he entered the circle around Marin Mersenne, a clearinghouse of correspondence and debate that connected thinkers across Europe. There he exchanged ideas with Rene Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, among others. Hobbes contributed the Third Set of Objections to Descartes's Meditations in 1641, challenging aspects of Descartes's metaphysics and epistemology and pressing a materialist account that made intelligibility and causation hinge on motion and body. A visit to Italy during these years brought him into contact with the legacy of Galileo Galilei, whose mechanics and insistence on mathematical explanation encouraged Hobbes's own aspiration to construct a unified, deductive science of nature, mind, and politics.

Out of these encounters came Hobbes's project to build philosophy from first principles. He imagined a three-part system: a foundation in body (De Corpore), an account of the human being (De Homine), and a culminating political science (De Cive). A first draft of his political doctrines circulated in 1640 as The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, which linked a mechanistic psychology to a theory of civil authority. Sensing that its arguments might be deemed seditious in a time of mounting tensions between King Charles I and Parliament, Hobbes left for Paris late in 1640, beginning an exile that would last more than a decade.

Civil War, Exile, and Leviathan
Hobbes watched the English Civil War from abroad, convinced that the breakdown of authority stemmed from doctrinal confusion and ecclesiastical pretensions as much as from political miscalculation. In Paris he published De Cive in Latin in 1642, a compact presentation of his political theory that won attention in learned circles. Beginning in 1646 he also tutored the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, in mathematics, an arrangement that gave Hobbes both a close connection to the royal cause and personal protection in Parisian society.

His most famous work, Leviathan, appeared in 1651 in English. Written in a vigorous and polemical style, it began with a mechanistic account of sensation, language, and imagination, and then traced the emergence of political society from a hypothetical state of nature. In that condition, where there is no common authority, individuals live under a constant threat of conflict, producing a condition that Hobbes memorably described as a war of every man against every man. To escape this misery, rational individuals covenant to authorize a sovereign with sufficient, undivided power to maintain peace and security. The sovereign could take the form of a monarch or an assembly, but Hobbes favored the stability of monarchy. He also argued that the authority of the sovereign must extend over religious doctrine and worship as far as public order requires, a position that undermined clerical independence and drew the accusation of atheism from some opponents.

Leviathan offended many English royalists in exile, who disliked its uncompromising account of subjection to de facto power during a civil war, and it antagonized theologians. The controversy prompted Hobbes to return to England in 1651, where he submitted to the Commonwealth authorities and lived quietly under their protection. His political arguments nevertheless continued to circulate and provoke debate among supporters and enemies of the regimes that followed.

Restoration, System-Building, and Controversies
After the Restoration in 1660, Hobbes's old pupil ascended the throne as Charles II, and the philosopher enjoyed the protection of royal favor and a modest pension. That patronage did not shield him from intellectual battles. He set out to complete his philosophical system: De Corpore appeared in 1655, laying out his views on logic, geometry, and physics; De Homine followed in 1658, applying his mechanical psychology to perception and voluntary action. He recast elements of his political theory in Latin and published a Latin version of Leviathan in 1668, revising and clarifying several contentious points.

Hobbes's combative temperament and confidence in deductive method drew him into prolonged disputes. With the mathematician John Wallis he engaged in a bitter exchange over geometry and the possibility of squaring the circle, a fight that spanned decades and helped sour his relations with the newly founded Royal Society. Many of its members, including Wallis and Robert Boyle, championed experimental methods that Hobbes distrusted. In works such as Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris he criticized Boyle's air-pump experiments and the experimental program more generally, arguing that hypotheses should be grounded in clear definitions and demonstrated consequences rather than in what he considered fragile and inconclusive experiments. The resulting Boyle-Hobbes controversy, carried forward in correspondence and print and facilitated by figures such as Henry Oldenburg at the Royal Society, exemplified a deep methodological divide in seventeenth-century science.

He also crossed swords with bishops and divines. A long-running dispute with John Bramhall, later Archbishop of Armagh, focused on free will and predestination. Hobbes defended a compatibilist position, arguing that liberty is the absence of external impediments to motion and that necessity is compatible with accountability. Their exchange, beginning with an informal debate in the 1640s, issued in publications that refined Hobbes's views on human action and moral responsibility. Ecclesiastical authorities and members of Parliament sometimes sought to suppress his writings; in 1666 a committee of the House of Commons investigated his works for alleged heresies. Though he escaped prosecution, he was cautioned against publishing on religion without license, a warning he heeded even as he continued to write.

Later Writings and Personal Life
Supported by the Cavendishes, Hobbes spent his later years at their houses, including Chatsworth and Hardwick. He continued to publish and to revise earlier writings, and he embraced literary projects that exhibited another side of his learning. Notably, he produced verse translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in the 1670s, a remarkable undertaking for a man in his eighties. He also composed autobiographical verse in Latin and maintained a lively correspondence with friends and adversaries. Some of his political manuscripts, including Behemoth, or The Long Parliament, a trenchant analysis of the causes of the Civil War, circulated privately and were published after his death. He likewise drafted A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, an exploration of the relation between sovereign authority and English legal traditions; it too appeared posthumously.

Hobbes remained connected to many of the figures who had shaped his life. The Cavendish family continued to offer patronage. He retained cordial relations with Charles II despite clerical complaints about his irreligious tendencies. He remained a foil for scientists in the orbit of the Royal Society, and his name figured in the philosophical reflections of contemporaries and successors, from Gassendi and Descartes, with whom he had fenced intellectually in the 1640s, to later thinkers who found in his arguments a starting point for political debate.

Death and Legacy
Thomas Hobbes died on 4 December 1679, aged ninety-one, at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, and was buried at Ault Hucknall. His extraordinarily long life spanned the last flowering of Renaissance humanism, the upheavals of the English Civil War, and the early institutionalization of modern science. He is remembered above all for Leviathan, which established a durable framework for thinking about sovereignty, authority, and political obligation. The core of his theory was a social contract: individuals authorize a sovereign to escape the insecurity of a pre-political condition, trading unregulated liberty for protection and the possibility of industry, arts, and civilized life. This account placed security at the foundation of politics and insisted that disputes about religion must not be allowed to fracture the state.

Hobbes's influence has been both direct and contentious. He helped set the agenda for later contract theorists and critics alike. His materialism and his insistence on precise definitions informed subsequent debates about method in philosophy and science, even among those who rejected his hostility to experiment. His public quarrels with figures such as John Wallis and Robert Boyle crystallized tensions between deductive and experimental approaches; his exchanges with John Bramhall sharpened the vocabulary of debates over liberty and necessity. Through it all, Hobbes remained faithful to a vision of philosophy as a rigorous, systematic enterprise, moving from the simplest motions of bodies to the laws of political order. The people around him, from patrons like the Cavendishes and protectors like Charles II to adversaries like Descartes, Gassendi, Wallis, Boyle, and Bramhall, were essential to the making of that vision and to the worldwide conversations it still provokes.

Our collection contains 34 quotes who is written by Thomas, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice - Deep.

Other people realated to Thomas: Rene Descartes (Mathematician), Joseph Glanvill (Writer), Kenelm Digby (Celebrity), A. P. Martinich (Philosopher), Giambattista Vico (Philosopher), William Davenant (Poet), John Aubrey (Writer), Bernard de Mandeville (Philosopher)