Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes studied at Oxford and spent decades as a tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family. Associated with the royalist side, he left England late in 1640 and lived in exile in Paris until 1651, during the civil wars. His major political works, The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, start from a mechanistic account of human nature and ask why rational people would accept political authority. His answer is a social contract: individuals give up their natural liberty to a sovereign whose power must be unified and effectively unlimited, because divided authority leads back to civil war.

Hobbes is widely regarded as a founder of modern social contract theory and of the idea that political authority rests on the consent and interests of individuals rather than on divine right. Royalists distrusted him for grounding sovereignty in consent, and clergy attacked him as a materialist and alleged atheist. Later liberals rejected his absolutism but adopted his individualist starting point. Realist theorists of international relations draw on his account of anarchy between states, while critics argue that his view of human nature is too bleak and overstates the case for unchecked power.