Hobbes's State of Nature and the War of All Against All

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), born in Westport, Wiltshire — by his own later account prematurely, when his mother went into labor upon hearing rumors of the approaching Spanish Armada — developed his political philosophy amid the trauma of the English Civil War (1642–1651) and the execution of Charles I in 1649. Educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and for many years tutor and secretary to the aristocratic Cavendish family, Hobbes spent much of the 1640s in exile in Paris, where he completed the Latin treatise De Cive (1642) before returning to England shortly after publishing his masterwork, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, in 1651. Leviathan opens its political argument with a thought experiment: what would human life be like in a "state of nature," a hypothetical condition prior to, or entirely without, any common political authority. Hobbes grounds this analysis in a broader materialist and mechanistic psychology, developed across his trilogy of De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive, according to which human beings are complex machines whose passions are ultimately reducible to motions toward or away from objects, the pursuit of self-preservation being paramount among them.