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Brief Lives

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Hilarius Bogbinder looks at a man who wanted to make Peace from Warre.

“One of the greatest geniuses of the 17th Century” was how Pierre Bayle (1646-1707), a French lexicographer, described Thomas Hobbes in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (p.467). It is hard to argue with this assessment, even for a man who was a contemporary of Newton, Galileo, Shakespeare, and Descartes. Hobbes was born under Elizabeth I (1537-1603), and his life overlapped with Shakespeare’s (1564-1616), though the Bard was not mentioned in the philosopher’s works.

We know a lot about Hobbes, not least because he presented his story well: he wrote several autobiographies to defend himself from charges of atheism.

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