Hobbes, Thomas
Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)An English philosopher and social theorist of the Enlightenment. Hobbes's most influential writings in political philosophy span the period of the English Civil War, and are widely interpreted as an intellectual response to the experience of political instability and personal insecurity. His major work Leviathan (1651) offered a justification for absolute political authority which purported to be a deduction from human nature. Hobbes's account of human nature was an extraordinarily thoroughgoing and ingenious extension of the science of mechanics (as learned from Galileo). According to Hobbes, the whole range of human psychological attributes—sense-perception, memory, imagination, thought, speech, and the passions—were effects of the motions of the minute particles of matter of which we, like other material bodies, are composed. On this view of our nature, action is governed...
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