Thomas Hobbes

Thomas HobbesGreatest works Leviathan (published 1651)-Born in the year of the Spanish Armada.-Educated at Oxford.-In 1640 he and many families of the aristocracy fled England after the execution of Charles I and the threat of Cromwell's republican armies.-Deeply distressed by the outbreak of war and the causes of Political disorder.

The State of Nature Self Preservation- Hobbes emphasises that human beings are operating purely on a self-preservation basis. Indeed he speaks of humans in the beginning of Leviathan in a very objective, scientific manner: 'What is life but a motion of limbs? What is the heart but a spring, or reason but a means of calculating pleasure and pains'. Materialistic - Hobbes analysis of human nature is deliberately materialistic and non-teleological physics. Conservation of Motion - Hobbes uses Galileo's principle of the Conservation of motion to emphasise the point that human being are always in search for something: Felicity. Felicity: Continual success in achieving the objects of desire, e.g happiness. Human nature: Overriding motivations of human behaviour is largely negative, desire to avoid some evil, not good. We enter society to avoid the greatest evil namely death at the hands of others. Politics: Politics for Hobbes, is less a matter of prudential decisions of better or worse but more an existential decision of choosing life or death. 'The Sovereign' : The sovereign, unlike government, is not a direct expression of the will, but rather an abstraction from my natural desire to rule myself. Competition: Everyone's natural,continual, attempt to increase power - to have riches and people under one's command - will lead to competition.  Equal; Hobbes also assumes that human beings are by nature 'equal' - we are equal in that all human beings possess roughly the same level of strength and skill, and so any human has the capacity to kill the other. State of Nature: The state of nature, therefore, is a scarcity of goods. No one in the state of nature can make himself invulnerable from attack.  Three principle reasons for attack: 1) For GAIN,  2) For SAFETY,   3) For GLORY/ REPUTATION State of War: From these assumptions of equality, scarcity of goods and uncertainty it follows that the state of nature will be a state of war.

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