Alex Howard

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)

Among the figures who were conscious of developing a new science in the seventeenth century, the Englishman Hobbes stands out as an innovator in ethics, politics and psychology. He was active in a number of other fields, notably geometry, ballistics and optics, and seems to have shown considerable acumen as a theorist of light. His contemporaries, especially in Continental Europe, regarded him as a major intellectual figure. Yet he did not earn a living as a scientist or a writer on politics. In 1608 he entered the service of Henry Cavendish, First Earl of Devonshire, and maintained his connections with the family for more than seventy years, working as tutor, translator, travelling companion, business agent and political counsellor. The royalist sympathies of his employers and their circle determined Hobbes’ allegiances in the period preceding and during the English Civil War. Hobbes’ first political treatise, The Elements of Law (1640), was not intended for publication but was meant as a sort of long briefing paper that royalists in parliament could use to justify actions by the king. EvenLeviathan (1651), which is often read as if it is concerned with the perennial questions of political philosophy, betrays its origins in the disputes of the pre-Civil War period in England.