Hobbes

Hobbes wrote *Leviathan* (1651) in the middle of the English Civil War, with friends dead and the country fractured. The book bears its context. The state of nature, for Hobbes, is what you get when the sovereign collapses: "war of all against all," life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Civil society is the contract — everyone gives up the right to self-help in exchange for the security a sovereign can provide.

The metaphysics underneath is austere. Hobbes is a strict materialist: minds are matter, sensations are motions in the body, will is just the last appetite before action. There are no Aristotelian final causes hiding in nature; there's just stuff moving according to mechanical laws. Morality isn't discovered; it's constructed, by agreement, to keep the war of all against all from resuming.

The political theory derives downward from these premises. People are roughly equal in their capacity to harm each other, and scarcity makes some conflict inevitable. The only stable solution is to authorize a single sovereign — monarch, assembly, whatever — with effectively absolute power. Resistance to that sovereign reopens the war that the contract existed to end. The argument is uncomfortable: many readers want the resistance Hobbes denies them. But the logical structure of the case is what makes him the founding text of modern political philosophy. Every subsequent contract theorist — Locke, Rousseau, Rawls — is responding to Hobbes.

He was anti-clerical in an era when that was dangerous. The book's last quarter is an extended attack on the Catholic Church and on the political ambitions of religious authorities of any stripe. He died at ninety-one, having outlived most of his enemies, after a long life of being denounced by clerics, royalists, parliamentarians, and Oxford dons in roughly equal measure.