Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes — born prematurely in 1588 as the Armada approached ("my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear") — lived ninety-one years through England's religious civil wars and distilled them into the most formidable political treatise in the language.

Leviathan (1651) begins not with God but with matter in motion. Man is a machine of appetites; the natural condition of mankind, without a common power to awe us, is war of every man against every man, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Reason's escape is contract: each lays down his right of nature and authorizes a sovereign — one man or assembly — whose word is law and whose power is undivided. The Leviathan, that "mortal god," exists not by divine right but by human covenant made from fear of death: an entirely secular foundation for the state, published while a king's blood was fresh on the scaffold.

Half of Leviathan — the half moderns skip — is about religion, because his enemies were clergy of every party who claimed a power beside the sovereign's. Books III and IV subject scripture itself to political reading: prophecy, miracles, and "the Kingdome of Darknesse" of Aristotle-corrupted theology are examined with corrosive literalism. Religion, he wrote, is "fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed" — allowed, it is religion; not allowed, superstition. The Church must be under the state, or there are two masters and therefore war.

Accused of atheism in Parliament (he professed a materialist theism — even God, being real, must be body), he prudently burned papers and outlived his accusers, translating Homer in his eighties. Every social-contract theorist since — Locke, Rousseau, Rawls — is arguing with him.