HOBBES, THOMAS (b. Malmesbury, England, 5 April 1588; d. Hardwick, Derbyshire, England, 4 December 1679), political philosophy, moral philosophy, geometry, optics.

    in the independent existence of universals or absolute ideas, or classes of things as separate entities. Human language consists of names of things and names of names, all joined by predicates. Names of names, or universals, must not be confused with names of things; universals exist in the mind and things exist in the external world; but universals are not therefore to be despised, because, being rooted in language, they play their part in the reasoning process. “Truth” for Hobbes is analytic, a product of the correct reasoning about names.

Hobbes was uncompromising in the application of his nominalist principles to ethics. He argued that ethical judgments are the products of human thought and culture. “For these words of good, evil and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.” The same kind of analysis was given to the notion of justice, which Hobbes believed to have no independent or absolute existence. In Hobbes's view, justice is a function of positive law, and all law is essentially positive law. “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.” Justice and injustice “are qualities that relate to men in society, not solitude,” and they draw their meaning from the declared intentions and enforcements of the civil magistrate.

Such a doctrine of ethical relativism and legal positivism was profoundly offensive to orthodox opinion in the seventeenth century; in particular, it ran counter to traditional conceptions of natural law, which were conceived of as laws of eternal and immutable morality, antecedent to positive civil law, originating, as Richard Hooker had put it, “in the bosom of God.” Modern scholars disagree about the meaning of Hobbes's natural law doctrine. Some commentators, such as A. E. Taylor and Howard Warrender, argue that certain obligations of the citizen and all the obligations of the sovereign to his subjects are, according to Hobbes, grounded in a natural law antecedent to civil law; on the other hand, Michael Oakeshott believes that all those prerogatives of the citizen which are immune to sovereign authority, such as the citizen's right of self-preservation, and the obligations of the sovereign himself, are rational, not moral, obligations. In this view natural law is prudential. Whichever view is correct, there can be no doubt that Hobbes cast his natural law doctrine in a secular mold.

In the same secular spirit Hobbes developed his ideas of human nature. Man is a part of material nature, so his behavior, including the behavior of his mind, can ultimately be understood by reference to physical laws. Viewed from a shorter perspective, human behavior is seen by Hobbes to be grounded in self-interest, especially in the fundamental desire to survive. Hobbes did not argue that human nature was an entity separate from human culture, but he asked his readers to imagine what life would be like in the absence of culture—in the absence, that is, of social conventions and civil restraint. This is Hobbes's famous hypothetical picture of the “state of nature.” Men in this condition are rapacious and predatory; and since they are equal in the things they want and equal in their capacities to satisfy their desires, they live in a state of continuous warfare or, at the very least, in a condition of fear, their lives being then “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The grimness of this picture is relieved for the modern reader by his discovery that Hobbes believed very strongly in the doctrine of human equality; and although Hobbes chose not to develop the democratic implications of this doctrine, his sense of human equality is wholly at variance with the precepts and practices of the modern totalitarian state.

What Hobbes feared more than the tyranny of a sovereign was anarchy, and so he constructed a model of the state in which he thought anarchy would be impossible. Moved by their fears and passions, and instructed by their reason, men would come to realize that they can be delivered from the state of nature only by the generation of a stable commonwealth. The process by which the state comes into being was not intended by Hobbes to be construed historically; in general he believed that men will come first to recognize the significance and utility of the “laws of nature”—or some twenty theorems of conduct conducive to peace which Hobbes enumerated, and which he said are summed up in the golden rule. But at this stage these theorems of peace are merely comprehended; what is required is the power to enforce them, and this power resides only in a commonwealth—and then only in its “soul,” the sovereign, who must rule with absolute sway.

To achieve this condition of enforceable peace, men will make a sort of contract among themselves (but not between themselves and the sovereign) to transfer their individual powers to a central sovereign authority. Hobbes did not insist that the sovereign be a single individual; although he favored monarchy, he thought that a body of men, a parliament, or even a king and parliament working in concert could achieve the same results. The main point was that the power of the sovereign be absolute, for the slightest diminution of his power would erode the security of the citizens; and it was for their security