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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic," Thomas Hobbes meticulously delineates the foundational principles of human nature, governance, and societal order. Utilizing a systematic and analytical approach, Hobbes presents an intricate examination of the social contract and the necessity of a sovereign authority to prevent the chaos of the state of nature. This work, initially published in parts as "Elements of Law" in 1640, is characterized by Hobbes's clear prose and a logical progression of ideas that weave together philosophy, political theory, and moral reasoning in a period marked by civil strife and intellectual upheaval. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), an English philosopher and political theorist, lived through the tumultuous events of the English Civil War, which profoundly influenced his views on authority and human behavior. His experiences shaped his belief in the inherent selfishness of humans and the need for a powerful centralized government to ensure peace and stability. These ideas were groundbreaking at the time and laid the groundwork for modern political philosophy. For readers interested in the origins of social contract theory or the interplay between individual rights and state power, "The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic" is an essential text. Hobbes's compelling arguments provide a critical lens through which to examine contemporary political issues, making this work not only a historical artifact but a relevant guide to understanding human governance. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic
Table of Contents
Introduction
From the tinder of fear and the calculus of reason, a common power rises to still the quarrels of many wills.
The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic endures as a classic because it captures a pivotal moment when modern political thought was taking shape, arranging human passions and public authority into a coherent system. Its arguments continue to provoke debate about obligation, sovereignty, and the purposes of law, themes that echo through literature, philosophy, and political theory. As an early statement of Thomas Hobbes’s vision, it has influenced generations of writers who grappled with the relationship between individual desire and collective peace. The book’s economy of style and relentless logic give it a durable clarity that keeps attracting new readers.
Thomas Hobbes composed this work in 1640, in the tense years preceding the English Civil War, and circulated it in manuscript among associates. Its author was already known for his engagement with the new scientific learning and for a sharp, analytical intellect attuned to political crisis. The book presents a systematic account of human psychology and the foundations of civil authority. Hobbes’s purpose was to explain how stable political order can be justified and maintained, given the ways people think, feel, and act. Without divulging the arc of his conclusions, the text announces its ambition: to bring politics under the discipline of reasoned principles.
First printed in 1650, The Elements of Law appeared in two parts titled Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, a division that reflects its movement from individual mind to collective power. Later editions often brought these parts together under the present title, making clear the unity of Hobbes’s project. This publication context matters because it shows the treatise’s double scope: the study of what we are by nature and the study of how we live under law. It also confirms the book’s place as a precursor to Leviathan, clarifying the path of Hobbes’s developing thought in the decade around mid-century.
Human Nature, the first part, considers sensation, imagination, language, reasoning, and the passions, assembling a picture of human agency that is exacting without being abstracted from everyday life. Hobbes surveys how people form beliefs, pursue ends, and coordinate actions, and he sets out principles that guide prudent conduct. In this analysis, moral and civil norms are not treated as mysteries but as intelligible responses to needs and vulnerabilities. The emphasis falls on clarity: to understand law and obligation, one must first understand how judgment, desire, and fear operate in ordinary experience and how they can be directed toward peace.
De Corpore Politico, the second part, turns from the inner motions of persons to the outward structures of authority. It examines the making of commonwealths, the nature and reach of sovereignty, the function of civil laws, and the conditions of public safety. Hobbes is concerned with the legitimacy of command and the limits of liberty under stable government, aiming to show how order can arise from consent and enforcement. The argument links legal rules to their ends—security and cooperation—while insisting on the practical means needed to sustain them. Throughout, the thread remains steady: peace requires an intelligible and enforceable framework.
Hobbes’s intention is not to recount historical episodes or rehearse inherited doctrines, but to ground politics in a disciplined account of human nature and rational choice. He seeks principles that can be stated clearly, defended rigorously, and applied consistently, even in unsettled times. The Elements of Law proposes that institutions are intelligible artifacts, built to settle disputes, align expectations, and channel power toward common safety. Behind the analysis lies a sober aim: to show why obedience to law, properly constituted, is the surest defense against the miseries of unregulated conflict, and how such obedience can be justified without appeal to mystifying authorities.
Method matters in this book. Hobbes writes with a scientific spirit shaped by the emerging seventeenth-century fascination with method, clarity, and demonstration. He prefers definitions, distinctions, and carefully sequenced arguments to rhetorical flourish, and he treats political concepts as precise tools rather than loose slogans. The approach is mechanical in the best sense: it looks for causes, effects, and the rules by which complex wholes arise from simple parts. This stance does not drain politics of value; it equips the reader to see how norms can be justified by reference to shared interests, predictable incentives, and the logic of coordinated action.
As an early articulation of ideas later amplified in Leviathan, The Elements of Law helped set the agenda for modern debates about social contract, sovereignty, and legal authority. Subsequent thinkers engaged, adapted, or contested Hobbes’s claims, and in doing so kept his categories alive: consent, obligation, natural law, and civil law. The book’s imprint can be traced in discussions of legal positivism, constitutional design, and international order, where the ties between power, rules, and legitimacy remain central. Even when critics reject Hobbes’s conclusions, they often borrow his questions, a measure of the lasting influence of this concentrated treatise.
The experience of reading The Elements of Law is one of steady accumulation. Hobbes’s prose is austere and pointed, preferring spare formulations to ornament, yet it is animated by striking images such as the body politic and the architecture of institutions. The style demands attention but rewards it with coherence: terms are defined, claims are stated plainly, and conclusions follow with visible necessity. For literary history, this economy matters. It shows a prose capable of bearing philosophical weight without losing force, and it demonstrates how a political argument can be built with the compactness of a theorem and the urgency of public counsel.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance is immediate. It addresses perennial tensions between liberty and security, private interest and public order, conscience and law. In eras of polarization and fractured authority, Hobbes’s insistence on the conditions that make promises credible and rules effective feels newly practical. The analysis clarifies why institutions must be designed to manage disagreement, why enforcement matters, and how language and law shape collective life. Students of philosophy, law, political science, and history will find a framework that still organizes debate, while general readers encounter a lucid guide to the mechanics of living together.
The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic distills a central insight: political stability depends on understanding human nature and building legal structures that harness it toward peace. Its major themes—reason and passion, consent and command, order and liberty—anchor a vision that remains strikingly current. As an early, rigorous statement of modern political thought, it combines intellectual ambition with practical intent, offering clarity in place of confusion and structure in place of strife. That combination explains its lasting appeal. It invites readers not merely to judge institutions but to grasp the principles by which they are made and justified.
Synopsis
Thomas Hobbes’s The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic presents a systematic account of human nature and civil order in two linked parts. The first part, Human Nature, examines how perception, thought, and passion shape human conduct. The second, Of the Body Politic, builds a political science upon those findings, explaining the origin, structure, and authority of commonwealths. Hobbes’s method proceeds from definitions and causal analysis to conclusions about peace and obedience. The work aims to show that durable civil peace depends on understanding the springs of action in individuals and constructing institutions that channel those forces toward collective security.
Hobbes begins with sense, arguing that all knowledge starts from external motions acting on the senses. Imagination is described as decaying sense, lingering as memory and forming the basis of dreams. From these impressions arise trains of thought, which may be unguided and associative or regulated by design toward a goal. Experience joins with foresight when repeated sequences allow expectations about the future. By rooting cognition in bodily motion and sensory impact, Hobbes positions his analysis as naturalistic and cumulative, preparing to trace how complex reasoning and social practices emerge from simple beginnings in sensation and memory.
Speech, for Hobbes, provides the main instrument for ordering thought and cooperating with others. Names register ideas; definitions fix their meanings; and propositions allow reckoning about causes and effects. Reason is the correct addition and subtraction of names in valid inference. Science arises when definitions are exact and reasoning is consistent; error and conflict flourish when speech is equivocal or passions distort meaning. Distinguishing knowledge from opinion and belief, Hobbes urges precise language to avoid disputes rooted in verbal confusion. This foundation links intellectual clarity to civic stability, since public order depends on settled definitions and recognized authority.
Turning to passions, Hobbes catalogs appetites and aversions, joy and grief, hope and fear, and related motions of the mind. Good and evil are relative to desire and aversion, not properties inherent in things. Deliberation is the alternation of desires until a final inclination, called the will, determines action. From comparison of power and obstacles arise courage and despair; from novelty, curiosity; from success, glory. These dynamics explain competition, diffidence, and the pursuit of reputation. Hobbes’s moral vocabulary thus describes motivations rather than intrinsic virtues, preparing an account of conduct that treats morality as rules for managing passions in society.
Hobbes analyzes liberty as the absence of external impediments and distinguishes voluntary action from freedom understood in that sense. He explores counsel and command, showing how advice persuades while authority binds. Conscience is treated as private judgment or opinion, not a public rule. Obligation arises when a person is bound by covenant, which is a voluntary undertaking to limit one’s liberty for a benefit. Because passions incline individuals to partiality and conflict, private judgment cannot secure common peace. This diagnosis sets the stage for rules of natural reason that guide cooperative behavior and for the need of a public power to enforce them.
Hobbes articulates laws of nature as rational precepts for preservation and peace. The first law counsels seeking peace when it may be had, and otherwise using all means for self-defense. The second urges a mutual laying down of the right to all things when others are willing to do the same, establishing the basis for covenants. The third prescribes performance of covenants, defining justice. Further precepts commend gratitude, accommodation, pardon, and equity, aiming to reduce causes of strife. These laws are binding in conscience as rules of reason, yet in the absence of enforcement, compliance is uncertain, leaving individuals in insecurity.
The transition to the political part explains how a commonwealth is instituted by covenant. Individuals authorize a sovereign power to represent them, unify their wills, and provide protection. The sovereign’s essential rights include making laws, judging controversies, determining doctrines necessary for peace, commanding the militia, conducting war and peace, appointing officers, and levying taxes. Hobbes evaluates forms of commonwealth—democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy—by their capacity to preserve peace. He argues that undivided authority is crucial and favors monarchy for its unity of counsel and secrecy, while acknowledging that any form with indivisible sovereignty can secure the ends of civil society.
Civil law is defined as the command of the sovereign, and property is understood as a civil relation established by those laws. Crimes are violations of civil law; punishment is an instrument for deterrence and correction, applied by public authority. Hobbes delineates the liberty of subjects as activities not prohibited by law and stresses an inalienable right to self-preservation in immediate danger. He analyzes causes of sedition—competing jurisdictions, ambiguous doctrines, and independent ecclesiastical claims—and insists that religious teaching and public worship fall under the civil sovereign to avoid faction. Stability depends on clear laws, impartial judicature, and supremacy of public judgment.
The treatise concludes that lasting peace requires a common power founded on covenants and supported by clear law, reliable adjudication, and control over doctrines that bear on obedience. From a psychological account of desire, fear, and reason, Hobbes derives rules of natural law and shows why, without enforcement, they cannot overcome mistrust. Sovereign authority, undivided and publicly recognized, aligns private interest with collective security. The Elements of Law thus presents a unified civil science: it begins with sensation and language, proceeds through passions and rational precepts, and culminates in political institutions designed to prevent conflict and secure preservation for all.
Historical Context
Thomas Hobbes composed The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic in England in 1640, at the end of King Charles I’s Personal Rule and on the eve of the civil wars. The political center was London, where Parliament, the royal court at Whitehall, and the Inns of Court concentrated influence, while Oxford and Cambridge maintained scholastic curricula Hobbes opposed. The social climate was tense: fiscal innovations, religious conflict, and mobilized metropolitan crowds reshaped politics. Hobbes, long associated with the Cavendish household of Derbyshire and London, had recently returned from continental travels (1634–1637), bringing with him the mechanistic temper of the new science and a continental awareness sharpened by the Thirty Years’ War.
The place in which the book is intellectually set is a composite of Stuart England and a wider European world at war. England faced confessional polarization between Laudian Anglicans and Puritans, and constitutional quarrels over prerogative, taxation, and the militia. Scotland and England were entangled by ecclesiastical policies imposed from London, while the Dutch Republic and France offered contrasting models of fiscal-military states. London’s print shops, pulpits, and guild halls generated opinion at an unprecedented scale. Hobbes wrote primarily amid this English crisis but filtered it through experiences in Paris and Florence, where he encountered Marin Mersenne’s circle and Galileo’s physics, reframing politics as a science of motion and causes.
The Personal Rule of Charles I (1629–1640) followed the dissolution of Parliament after the Petition of Right (1628). The crown pursued revenue by nonparliamentary means, reviving feudal dues, expanding forest fines, and enforcing monopolies. Political forums narrowed to royal councils such as the Star Chamber and High Commission. The period stabilized finances yet deepened suspicion of arbitrary government. For Hobbes, who favored undivided sovereignty as a remedy for discord, these years illustrated both the possibility and fragility of order without consent-based taxation. The Elements of Law defends concentrated authority as necessary for peace, while implicitly responding to the legalist critique generated by a decade of prerogative governance.
Religious policy under Archbishop William Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, promoted ceremonial uniformity, emphasized episcopal authority, and curbed Puritan preaching. Laudian reforms involved altar rails, the beautification of churches, and enforcement by ecclesiastical courts, provoking resistance in England and especially Scotland. The campaign against nonconformity relied on the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber. Hobbes observed how confessional zeal could mobilize faction and threaten civil peace. In The Elements of Law he argues for subordinating clerical authority to the civil sovereign and for regulating public doctrine to prevent seditious theology, an argument shaped by the Laudian confrontation and its backlash.
Ship Money, extended from coastal towns to the entire realm in 1635, raised revenue for naval defense without parliamentary grant. John Hampden’s celebrated case (1637–1638) tested the tax’s legality before the Exchequer Chamber; in June 1638 twelve judges ruled seven to five for the crown. The narrow judgment, publicized nationwide, sharpened constitutional debate over emergency powers and property rights. Hobbes regarded taxation and obedience as inseparable from sovereignty’s essence. The Elements of Law treats such controversies as symptoms of divided authority and rhetorical manipulation, urging that security requires subjects to accept the sovereign’s judgment in matters necessary to common defense, including finance.
The Scottish National Covenant of 1638 repudiated the 1637 Anglican Prayer Book and defended Presbyterian governance. The First Bishops’ War (1639) ended in the Pacification of Berwick; the Second (1640) saw the Covenanter army cross the Tweed, defeat royal forces at Newburn on 28 August, and occupy Newcastle. The Treaty of Ripon (October 1640) required England to pay the Scots, pressuring Charles to summon Parliament. Hobbes read in these events the costs of religious uniformity imposed without effective consent. The Elements of Law mirrors this moment by subordinating ecclesiastical questions to civil peace and by warning that divided jurisdiction between church and state breeds war.
The Short Parliament sat from 13 April to 5 May 1640. It was dissolved after refusing supplies without redress of grievances, including Ship Money, monopolies, and ecclesiastical innovations. Figures such as John Pym framed grievances as systemic abuses, while the king, pressed by the Scottish invasion, sought immediate funds. The failure of this Parliament clarified how fiscal-military needs outstripped established constitutional routines. Hobbes, writing The Elements of Law in the spring and early summer of 1640, crafted a systematic defense of sovereign power precisely when parliamentary bargaining failed. His treatise reads as counsel against conditional obedience, anticipating that bargaining under fear would intensify faction.
The Long Parliament assembled on 3 November 1640 and initiated sweeping reforms: the impeachment of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (executed 12 May 1641); the Triennial Act (February 1641) mandating regular parliaments; and the abolition of the Star Chamber and High Commission (July 1641). The Root and Branch Petition (11 December 1640) demanded abolition of episcopacy, while the Grand Remonstrance (22 November 1641) catalogued grievances. As accusations of popery and tyranny widened, Hobbes feared the erosion of undivided authority. He left for Paris late in 1640 or early 1641. The Elements of Law frames these struggles as the pathology of sovereignty divided between multiple competing assemblies and clerical power.
Between 1637 and 1642 England entered a cascade of confrontations culminating in civil war that most directly shaped Hobbes’s project. After Scottish resistance to the Prayer Book (1637) and the Covenant (1638), two Bishops’ Wars compelled financial and political concessions. In 1641 Parliament’s legislative flood dismantled prerogative courts and curtailed royal control over dissolution. The Irish rebellion of October 1641 heightened fears of massacre, sharpened confessional anxieties, and intensified disputes over control of the militia. On 4 January 1642 Charles I entered the House of Commons to arrest the Five Members—John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, William Strode, and Arthur Haselrig—an unprecedented breach that galvanized London’s mobilized citizenry against the king. Parliament’s Militia Ordinance (March 1642), enacted without royal assent, claimed authority over armed force; the crown replied with Commissions of Array (June). Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions (1 June 1642) demanded sweeping oversight of ministers, the militia, and royal appointments, which the king rejected. Charles raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642; the first major battle, Edgehill, followed on 23 October. This sequence revealed, to Hobbes, how ambiguous sovereignty invited rival commands, unleashed rumor, and transformed theological disputes into armed camps. The Elements of Law, drafted just before outright war, theorizes a civil science in which peace depends upon a single, unquestioned source of law. It treats the militia dispute, the politicization of the pulpit, and crowd action as predictable products of divided jurisdiction, aiming to forestall precisely the breakdown that events from 1641 to 1642 made visible.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) convulsed central Europe, producing state-building under the pressure of confessional warfare. Key moments included the Sack of Magdeburg (20 May 1631), the death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen (1632), and the Treaties of Westphalia (1648). English observers feared continental-style devastation. Hobbes’s continental travels exposed him to fiscal-military administration and the costs of religiously framed conflict. In The Elements of Law he generalizes from this European crisis: when jurisdiction and doctrine are contested, fear multiplies, alliances shift, and violence follows. His remedy—a sovereign with authority over doctrine and arms—reflects lessons drawn from the German war’s prolonged anarchy.
The Scientific Revolution furnished Hobbes with method and metaphors. He had met Marin Mersenne’s Parisian circle and likely Galileo at Florence in 1636, absorbing a mechanistic understanding of motion and causation. William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (1628) exemplified explanatory reduction, while Euclidean geometry offered demonstrative certainty. In 1641 Hobbes contributed the Third Objections to Descartes’s Meditations, sharpening his commitment to clear definitions and deductions. The Elements of Law borrows this posture: political effects are treated as motions of bodies under laws of appetite and aversion, with authority functioning as an artificial soul of the commonwealth. The intellectual movement toward mechanism thus directly shaped its political science.
Common law constitutionalism and parliamentary privilege, championed by jurists such as Sir Edward Coke, collided with royal prerogative in early Stuart England. The Case of Proclamations (1610) limited the king’s capacity to legislate without Parliament, and the Petition of Right (7 June 1628) challenged forced loans and billeting. For many, these precedents grounded a rights-based, law-bound monarchy. Hobbes rejected mixed sovereignty as incoherent. The Elements of Law counters Cokean dispersion of authority by arguing that law derives from a single will whose power ensures obedience. It responds to the legal-historical turn of the 1620s–1630s by redefining law through command rather than custom or ancient constitution.
Hobbes’s 1629 English translation of Thucydides brought the ancient historian of the Peloponnesian War to Stuart readers alarmed by faction. Thucydides’s analysis of stasis—civil strife—described how words invert meanings and private interest masquerades as public virtue. Hobbes praised Thucydides as a writer who understood the costs of democratic demagogy and oligarchic plots. The Elements of Law reflects this classical lens: it treats rhetoric, rumor, and partisan preaching as engines of sedition, and it seeks institutional design—undivided sovereignty—to prevent cycles of revenge. The reception of Thucydides in 1629 thus furnished historical exempla for Hobbes’s diagnosis of English disorders.
Censorship and print regulation marked the 1630s. The Star Chamber decree of 1637 tightened licensing, constrained presses, and centralized control through the Stationers’ Company. After the abolition of Star Chamber (July 1641), a flood of pamphlets transformed political communication; Parliament attempted to restore licensing with the 1643 Ordinance. The Elements of Law circulated in manuscript in 1640, but only appeared in unauthorized print in London in 1650, split into Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, amid a deregulated public sphere born of revolution. Hobbes’s insistence that the sovereign regulate doctrine mirrors the decade’s experience that unlicensed opinion could accelerate faction and disorder.
Hobbes departed for Paris in late 1640 or early 1641, joining a royalist diaspora that included advisors and churchmen. In exile he frequented Mersenne’s gatherings and, from 1646, tutored the future Charles II. The community of émigrés depended on French tolerance and private patronage, illustrating for Hobbes the precariousness of security without a settled sovereign. Although The Elements of Law preceded his full exile, its argument was confirmed abroad: competing English authorities claimed allegiance, and propaganda crossed borders freely. The book’s advocacy of a single, visible locus of power was thus reinforced by the lived instability of displaced elites and by observation of continental absolutisms.
As a social and political critique, The Elements of Law exposes how ambiguous constitutional arrangements empower factions, clerics, and ambitious lawyers to compete for ultimate authority. Hobbes dissects rhetoric about liberty, conscience, and ancient rights as instruments for mobilizing crowds against necessary commands of the state. He criticizes universities for perpetuating Aristotelian doctrines and clerical pretensions that undermine civil science. The treatise recasts justice as compliance with civil law and reallocates interpretive authority to the sovereign, directly challenging claims of privileged estates or ecclesiastical courts. By treating sedition as a predictable product of divided jurisdiction, it indicts the era’s mixed constitution as a generator of conflict.
The book also scrutinizes social fractures: the politicization of London guilds, the power of pulpit oratory over artisans and apprentices, and the gentry’s ability to raise county forces. Hobbes argues that unequal interpretations of law, not material inequality alone, drove instability. He targets the militia question—who commands force—as the axis of order, insisting that property and trade require a coercive, unified authority. By subordinating church to state and redefining counsel versus command, he critiques both clerical domination and populist agitation. His depiction of rumor, petitions, and street theater as threats to peace is a severe appraisal of the 1640s public sphere and its injustices.
Author Biography
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher of the early modern period whose political thought helped define debates about authority, obligation, and civil peace. Living through the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, he argued that stable government is necessary to avoid the calamities of anarchy. His best-known work, Leviathan, presented a systematic account of human nature, language, law, and sovereignty, setting the terms for later social contract theory. Hobbes wrote across genres—translation, political and moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and jurisprudence—seeking a unified science of man and commonwealth. His influence spans philosophy, political theory, legal thought, and the history of ideas.
Hobbes was educated in England, studying at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he acquired a strong grounding in classical languages and scholastic philosophy. He later came to admire the clarity of Euclidean geometry and sought an equivalent method for moral and civic knowledge. Early in his career he joined the Cavendish household as tutor and secretary, a post that afforded security, libraries, and access to learned society. Repeated travels on the Continent brought him into contact with new scientific discussions and humanist scholarship. He cultivated an intellectual style that combined rigorous definition, mechanical explanation, and a preference for secular, system-building argument.
Hobbes first came to broader notice as a translator, publishing an influential English version of Thucydides. He valued the ancient historian for his analysis of civil strife and political realism, themes that resonated with Hobbes’s own concerns. During the mounting crises of the 1630s and 1640s he drafted The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, a manuscript treatise that circulated among his associates. There he sketched the psychology, ethics, and political theory he would develop more fully later. He treated human passions and speech as natural phenomena and argued that peace requires an authoritative framework of rules backed by a determinate sovereign power.
As conflict deepened in England, Hobbes spent extended periods in Paris, where he associated with learned circles and exiled royalists. He briefly instructed the future Charles II in mathematics, and he refined his political views among continental interlocutors. In this period he published De Cive, a compact Latin statement of his civil science, and then Leviathan, the capacious English work that made his name. Leviathan argued that humans, driven by fear of violent death and desires for commodious living, authorize a sovereign to secure peace. Its religious and political claims provoked controversy across confessional and partisan lines, shaping responses for decades.
Hobbes conceived a broader philosophical project, sometimes called the elements of philosophy, progressing from body (physics), to man (psychology), to citizen (politics). De Corpore addressed logical method and motion; De Homine treated sense, imagination, and speech; De Cive completed the political part. He defended a broadly materialist, mechanistic picture of nature and mind, seeking demonstrative certainty. These claims brought him into well-known disputes in mathematics and natural philosophy, including exchanges with John Wallis and criticisms of the experimental program associated with the Royal Society. Hobbes questioned the evidential status of experiments and championed deduction from clear definitions and principles.
After the Restoration, Hobbes enjoyed protection from some powerful patrons but faced renewed theological suspicion. Parliamentary attention to heresy in the mid-1660s encouraged him to avoid publishing on religious and political topics in England. He continued to revise and circulate his ideas, issuing a Latin version of Leviathan and composing historical and legal dialogues. Behemoth, his analysis of the causes of the Civil Wars, circulated in manuscript and appeared posthumously. He also returned to literary pursuits, producing late-life verse translations of Homer. Throughout, he defended the primacy of civil peace, the authority of law, and a secular account of the grounds of obligation.
Hobbes spent his later years under the protection of the Cavendish household, continuing to write, correspond, and respond to critics. He died in the late 1670s, leaving a corpus that remains a touchstone of modern political philosophy. His account of the state of nature, representation, and sovereignty shaped later thinkers who developed, modified, or opposed his views. In legal theory, he is associated with a positivist emphasis on law as command; in international relations, his arguments inform realist analyses of anarchy and security. Today his work is read for its rigor, its ambitions for a unified science of society, and its stark lessons about order and conflict.
The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic
PART I
Chapter 1: The General Division of Man's Natural Faculties
1. The true and perspicuous explication of the Elements of Laws, Natural and Politic, which is my present scope, dependeth upon the knowledge of what is human nature, what is a body politic, and what it is we call a law. Concerning which points, as the writings of men from antiquity downward have still increased, so also have the doubts and controversies concerning the same, and seeing that true knowledge begetteth not doubt, nor controversy, but knowledge; it is manifest from the present controversies, that they which have heretofore written thereof, have not well understood their own subject.
2. Harm I can do none though I err no less than they. For I shall leave men but as they are in doubt and dispute. But intending not to take any principle upon trust, but only to put men in mind what they know already, or may know by their own experience, I hope to err the less; and when I do, it must proceed from too hasty concluding, which I will endeavour as much as I can to avoid.
3. On the other side, if reasoning aright I win not consent (which may very easily happen) from them that being confident of their own knowledge weigh not what is said, the fault is not mine but theirs. For as it is my part to show my reasons, so it is theirs to bring attention.
