Renaissance/Early Modern
Thomas Hobbes
1588–1679
“Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice.”
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher writing through civil war and exile on the Continent. argues that without a common power human life is war of all against all, and that rational persons authorize an absolute sovereign to keep the peace. The contract is among the subjects; the sovereign stands outside it, undivided and unlimited by positive law. Consent founds government. Once given, the authorization is nearly total. Locke and later liberals keep the consent and reject the absolute grant.
In the Conversation
46 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Justice
Justice is keeping covenants. Before the sovereign, there is no justice or injustice.
Good and Evil
Good and evil are names for what we desire or avoid, not objective properties of things.
Courage
Courage is a passion born of the confidence to overcome obstacles; in the state of nature, it is the engine of conflict.
Desire
Desire is mechanical motion toward an object; happiness is the continual success of desire, and there is no final end.
Punishment
Punishment is an evil inflicted by sovereign authority for the sole purpose of bending the will toward future obedience.
Duty
Duty begins only with the Commonwealth; without sovereign power, there is no justice and no obligation.
Emotion
Emotions are motions toward or from objects; they are the springs of all voluntary action.
Pleasure and Pain
Pleasure is the appearance of good, pain of evil; all voluntary action springs from desire for pleasure or aversion to pain.
Honor
Honor is the social valuation of power — nothing more, and all the classical vocabulary of virtue is either confusion or self-flattery.
Custom and Convention
There is no justice or injustice in the state of nature; all social order is conventional, established by covenant and enforced by power.
Politics
Liberty
Liberty is the absence of external impediment. Nothing more.
Government
Legitimate government is absolute sovereignty, authorized by the consent of the governed.
Law
Law is the sovereign's command. Its authority derives from power, not reason.
War and Peace
War is the natural condition of humanity without government.
Democracy
Sovereignty must be absolute and undivided; democracy is legitimate only where it is obeyed as one will.
State
The state is an artificial creation, a Leviathan constructed by contract to end the war of all against all.
Revolution
Rebellion is war renewed; no revolution can be justified because the sovereign's power alone prevents universal war.
Tyranny
The name 'tyranny' is merely 'monarchy misliked'; absolute power is necessary, and calling the sovereign a tyrant is mere displeasure.
Citizen
Outside the sovereign's authority there are no citizens, only individuals at war; the covenant creates subjects, not self-governing members.
Slavery
Slavery is dominion acquired by conquest: the vanquished submits to preserve his life.
Constitution
Sovereign power is absolute and indivisible; no constitutional arrangement can bind the sovereign without destroying sovereignty itself.
Monarchy
Sovereignty must be absolute and undivided; monarchy is the best form because one will suffers fewer divisions than many.
Aristocracy
Sovereignty is always absolute; the difference between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy is a matter of convenience, not of principle.
Theology & Metaphysics
Metaphysics
Matter
The universe is body and nothing but body: whatever is, is material, and whatever is not material is not.
Opposition
All real opposition is mechanical: contrary motions in matter, and contrary appetites in human beings driven by self-preservation.
Relation
Relations are not features of the world but comparisons performed by the mind; to think is to compute, and to compute is to relate names to one another.
Quality
Qualities are nothing in the object itself but motions; what we call color, sound, and heat are phantasms produced in us by external pressure.
Quantity
All reasoning is reckoning: the addition and subtraction of quantities, whether of numbers, names, or propositions.
Eternity & Infinity
Epistemology
Mind
All thought is motion; reasoning is nothing but reckoning, the addition and subtraction of mental names.
Will
The will is nothing but the last appetite in deliberation; freedom belongs to the man, not to the will.
Language
Words are arbitrary marks for thoughts, and the abuse of language is the principal source of philosophical error.
Memory and Imagination
Imagination is decaying sense; memory is imagination with the awareness of past perception.
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is dangerous because metaphor breeds confusion; clear definitions, not eloquence, serve the Commonwealth.
Sense
Sensation is nothing but motion in the organs caused by external bodies pressing upon them.
Sign and Symbol
Words are arbitrary marks for recording and communicating thought; truth is a property of speech, not of things.
Mathematics
Mathematics is computation with names: adding, subtracting, and reckoning consequences from definitions.
Logic & Method
Reasoning
Reasoning is computation: adding and subtracting names according to agreed definitions.
Definition
Definitions are purely verbal: they fix the meanings of names, and the only test of a good definition is internal consistency and avoidance of ambiguity.
Universal and Particular
There is nothing universal in the world; universals are only names, and the whole controversy about them is, at bottom, a dispute about words.
Philosophy & Practical
Nature
Nature is matter in motion. And human nature, in its state of nature, is war of all against all.
Prudence
Prudence is accumulated experience translated into reliable expectation — nothing more, and nothing about virtue or the Good.
Man
Man is a self-interested animal driven by desire and aversion; without a common power, his life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.