Thomas Hobbes has again become the center of lively discussion among philosophers, historians, and political theorists. Both as a participant in a revolutionary commonwealth and as a student of the science of human nature, Hobbes has achieved a new relevance to the contemporary world. Moralists are now apt to place him in the twentieth century, and historians are apt to portray him as an antique. The aim of these essays is to get an accurate account of how radical Hobbes was in his own revolutionary century.

The essays are the fruit of years of cooperative study, going back to the...

It is the Object of this essay to place the political philosophy of Hobbes in its own historic context. The history of thought is peculiarly exposed to an illusion of perspective. Earlier doctrines are always getting shoved, as it were, nearer our own day. We are familiar with the intellectual struggles of our own time and are interested in them. It is accordingly natural to envisage earlier thought as part of the same movement or as its forerunner. We then forget that that earlier period had its own specific problems, and we proceed to assimilate its discussions to our present...

Among His Remaining Papers there are some clear indications that Hobbes considered one of his philosophical tasks to be a critique of prevailing philosophies, followed by a fresh grounding of all human inquiries in a natural (non-supernatural) and rational “first philosophy.” Despite these intimations, no one has yet examined Hobbes’sphilosophia primain its own terms. Höffding regarded this philosophy as “the most profound materialistic system of modern times,”² but he did not discuss Hobbes’s first principles and theory of being. His acute and sympathetic student Frithiof Brandt has made a painstaking exploration of all Hobbes’s works from the earliest...

How Can a Man be a determinist and yet believe in obligation? One cannot have an obligation to do something unless he is able to do it or not to do it. If he cannot do it, it is absurd to say he is nonetheless obligated to do it; if he must do it because he cannot do otherwise, he does it as necessity, not as obligation. Hence genuine obligation rests on freedom. The issue then becomes: can human action be determined and yet in some way be free? Hobbes thinks it can, and in chapter XXI ofLeviathansays,...

In This Brief Study of an aspect of Hobbes’s philosophy I shall concentrate on his notions of power, the laws of nature, and the generation of a public person. Previously¹ I had pointed out that his examination of the liberty of natural bodies rested upon a rejection of the possibility of knowing supernatural bodies (e.g., God or soul), the acceptance of a mitigated or constructive skepticism regarding our knowledge of the motion of natural bodies—a concept recently examined by R. H. Popkin in his studies of seventeenth-century skepticism—and the application to human behavior of Galileo’s conjecture concerning the...

The History of mankind’s philosophic cries for peace from ancient times to the present must include an imposing literature of enlightened religion and desperate faith. To be genuinely philosophical such cries must combine a respect for peace of mind with a hope for peace on earth. They must be more than apocalyptic prophecies of a future bliss and less than illusory theories of collective security. It is in this context that I call attention to the faith and piety of Hobbes. His eloquent, passionate, and rational confession in a time of violence, revolution, and experiment gives to his philosophy an...

Hobbes Has Been the subject of controversy almost from the moment he set pen to paper and first involved himself in the burning political and religious issues which were to keep England in turmoil for a century. In the minds of many of his countrymen his willingness to expose the darker side of men’s nature, his often unique interpretations of Scripture, his materialism, and his unrelenting Erastianism combined to make him seem an arch-villain. If some, like Harrington, appreciated his powers, others would willingly have burned him as an atheist. He was the sort of thinker who was both too...