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Thomas Hobbes: Apologist for Absolutism Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the most original political philosopher of the 17th century, turned to reason and empirical observation to find an explanation for social institutions. Hobbes was an urbane and much-traveled man who enthusiastically supported the new scientific movement. He visited Paris and made the acquaintance of Rene Descartes. He spent time in Italy with Galileo, and he was interested in the work of William Harvey (1578-1657), the man who discovered that blood circulated through the human body. Hobbes was also a superb classicist. His translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, the first in English, is still read today. The English Civil War made Hobbes a political philosopher and inspired him to write Leviathan (1651) – a thoroughly materialistic and mechanical explanation for human conduct. Hobbes theorized that all psychological processes derive from bare sensation and that, therefore, all motivations are egotistical. Their intent is always to increase pleasure and minimize pain. The human power of reasoning is nothing more than a process of adding and subtracting the implications of the general names people agree to give to things. Despite his mechanistic view of human nature, Hobbes believed that people could progress by using scientific reasoning. Progress was contingent, however, on the correct and prior use of the greatest of human creations, the commonwealth. The commonwealth created the conditions that were essential for rational, civilized life. The key to Hobbes’s political philosophy is found in a brilliant myth he devised to explain humanity’s original state. Hobbes claimed that nature inclines people to a “restless and perpetual desire” for power. Because all people want, and in the state of nature possess, a right to everything, their equality breeds enmity, competition, diffidence, and perpetual quarreling—“a way of every man against every man.” Whereas earlier and later philosophers saw the original human condition as a paradise from which people had fallen, Hobbes described it as a corrupt environment from which people could be delivered only by the establishment of a politically organized society. Unlike Aristotle and Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes did not believe human beings were naturally sociable. He claimed that they were self-centered beasts who were utterly without discipline unless it was imposed on them by force. People escape their terrible natural state by entering a social contract; that is, by agreeing to live in a commonwealth ruled by law. A desire for “commodious living” and a fear of death drives them to accept the constraints of communal life. The social contract obliges every person, for the sake of peace and self-defense, to agree to set aside his or her right to all things and be content with as much liberty against others as he or she would allow others against him or herself. Because words and promises are insufficient to guarantee this agreement, the social contract also authorizes the coercive use of force to compel compliance. Believing the dangers of anarchy to be greater than those of tyranny, Hobbes thought that rulers should have unlimited power. There is little room in Hobbes’s political philosophy for protest in the name of individual conscience, nor for resistance to legitimate authority by private individuals. Seventeenth-century Catholics and Protestants alike criticized these features of the Leviathan, but Hobbes insisted that loss of rights for some individuals was clearly preferable to the suffering everyone experienced in a civil war. It mattered little to Hobbes whether his ruler was Charles the First, Oliver Cromwell, or Charles the Second (each of whom Hobbes supported), so long as he kept his subjects from reverting to the chaos that was their natural condition. But would this matter to you? The English Civil War was long ago? What would Hobbes think of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Communist China? What about more recent political crises such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the 1970s and 1980s? What about South Africa under Apartheid? What about Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Congo, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, the West Bank, and Iraq?