HOBBES, THOMAS
Sixteenth-century political theorist, philoso-
pher, and scientist THOMAS HOBBES left a stark
warning to succeeding generations: strong cen-
tral authority is the necessary basis for govern-
ment. In several influential works of legal,
political, psychological, and philosophical the-
ory, Hobbes’s view of society and its leaders was
founded on pessimism. He saw people as weak
and selfish, and thus in constant need of the
governance that could save them from destruc-
tion. These ideas profoundly affected the Feder-
alists during the early formation of U.S. law. The
Federalists turned to Hobbes’s work for justifi-
cation for passage of the U.S. Constitution as
well as for intellectual support for their own
movement in the years following that passage.
Today, Hobbes is read not only for his lasting
contributions to political-legal theory in general
but for the ideas that helped shape U.S. history.
Born on April 5, 1588, in Westport,Wiltshire,
England, the son of an Anglican clergyman,
Hobbes was a prodigy. By the age of fifteen, he
had entered Oxford University; by twenty, he was
appointed tutor to a prominent family, a post he
would later hold with the Prince of Wales. His
considerable output of work began with English
translations of FRANCIS BACON and Thucydides
while he was in his late thirties. Soon,mathemat-
ics interested him, and his travels brought him
into contact with some of the greatest minds of
his age: Galileo and Rene Descartes. His writing
canvassed many subjects, such as language and
science, to arrive at a general theory of people
and their leaders. The most influential works of
this polymath came in the 1650s: Leviathan, or
the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), De Corpore
(1655), and Questions Concerning Liberty, Neces-
sity, and Chance (1656). Hobbes died December
4, 1679, at age 91.
Hobbes was a supreme pessimist. To him,
people were inherently selfish; they struggled
constantly against one another for survival.
“[T]he life of a man,” he wrote in his master-
work, Leviathan, “is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish
and short.” Thus, people could not survive on
their own in the state of nature. This foundation
led him to a theory of the law: only by submit-
ting to the protection of a sovereign power could
individuals avoid constant ANARCHY and war.
The sovereign’s authority would have to be
absolute. Law derived from this authority rather
than from objective truth, which he argued did
not exist. All citizens of the state were morally
bound to follow the sovereign’s authority; other-
wise, law could not function. Hobbes chose the
leviathan (a large sea animal) to represent the
state, and he maintained that like a whale, the
state could only be guided by one intelligence: its
sovereign’s.
The influence of Hobbes’s ideas varied dra-
matically over the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. English politicians and clerics derided
him as a heretic. But his theories eventually lent
support to loyalists who wanted to preserve the
Crown’s control over the American colonies:
Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of
Massachusetts, viewed the upstart challengers to
royal authority in a Hobbesian light. Later,
Hobbes proved useful to the other side: after the
American Revolution, his ideas influenced the
Federalists in their arguments for adoption of
the federal Constitution in 1787. Embracing
Hobbes’s pessimism, the Federalists saw the
American people as unable to survive as a nation
without a strong central government that would
protect them from foreign powers.
Hobbes is still taught, and scholars continue
to discuss contemporary legal issues in the light
of his critique. Particularly relevant are his
insights into the form of law and the interrela-
tionship of law and politics, and his subtle
