Thomas Hobbes
1588 CE – 1679 CE · Early Modern Era
“Without government, life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short': we need a sovereign to keep peace.”
Biography
Hobbes witnessed the English Civil War and concluded that strong government is essential to prevent chaos. His Leviathan argues that rational self-interest drives people to surrender some freedoms to a sovereign authority in exchange for security and order, the social contract.
Major Works
Key Arguments
Click “Philosophy 101” to read the full exploration of each argument.
The State of Nature and the Prisoner's Dilemma
Without government, humans exist in a war of all against all, not because people are inherently evil, but because rational self-interest in the absence of enforceable agreements makes cooperation unstable. Even if two people would both benefit from cooperating, each has reason to defect: if you cooperate and the other person cheats, you lose everything. Rational self-interest therefore compels preemptive aggression, producing universal conflict. The only escape is a social contract: all parties surrender their freedom to a sovereign authority powerful enough to enforce agreements and punish defection. In 1950, mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher formalized precisely this logic as the Prisoner's Dilemma, one of the basic concepts of game theory. Two prisoners, unable to communicate, must each decide whether to cooperate or betray the other. Individual rationality drives both toward betrayal, even though mutual cooperation would leave both better off. Hobbes had identified the structure of the problem three centuries before it received its mathematical form.
Why it matters: Established the framework for modern political philosophy and social contract theory. The Prisoner's Dilemma, Hobbes's insight in formal dress, became a standard model in economics, biology, political science, and philosophy. It demonstrates why binding agreements, enforceable rules, and institutional trust are not luxuries but necessities for any cooperative society. Every subsequent political thinker, from Locke to Rawls, has had to respond to Hobbes's challenge.
Materialism and Mechanism
Everything that exists is matter in motion, including human thought, emotion, and will. There is no immaterial soul, no free will independent of physical causation. The mind is the brain; desires are internal motions toward objects; aversion is motion away. Even reasoning is a form of computation, adding and subtracting concepts the way we add and subtract numbers.
Why it matters: One of the earliest thoroughgoing materialist philosophies in modern Western thought. Hobbes anticipated the computational theory of mind by over three centuries and laid the groundwork for the scientific study of psychology. His insistence that human behavior follows natural laws, not divine commands, broke sharply with the prevailing view.
Absolute Sovereignty
The sovereign, whether a monarch or an assembly, must hold absolute, undivided power. There can be no separation of powers, no right of rebellion, and no authority above the sovereign except God. Any limitation on sovereign power recreates the conditions for civil war, because competing authorities will inevitably clash. The only alternative to absolute sovereignty is the state of nature.
Why it matters: The hardest-edged argument for strong central authority in early modern philosophy. While Locke and later liberals rejected Hobbes's absolutism, his core insight, that divided authority invites conflict, continues to shape debates about executive power, constitutional design, and the tension between liberty and order.
Lasting Influence
Set the terms for modern political philosophy. His social contract theory influenced Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls.
Your Reading Path
The Companion Guide
Seven eras of philosophy in one volume — reading lists, key terms, journal prompts · $19.99