Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), more clearly than anyone else, elaborated the conceptual framework that has predominated in all distinctively modern political thought ever since: government conceived as a “social contract” among radically independent individuals intending to protect their personal, pre-political liberties or “rights.” Hobbes laid out this framework and provided its philosophic justification, in several successive treatises, but his acknowledged masterpiece is Leviathan.

The Broad Historical Context

In the century and a half immediately prior to Hobbes, there had been two momentous reshapings of the intellectual landscape: first, the Protestant Reformation, which split Christianity forever into competing and, for a long time, warring sects; second, the emergence of modern, materialistic-mathematical physics – and the new, Baconian project of technology that we studied in the previous chapter. Hobbes’s political thought is deeply shaped by both these transformations.

Hobbes was transfixed by the sight of the horrible religious wars convulsing Europe, and he detected as their chief cause the fight among sects over clashing interpretations of what the Bible teaches government ought to implement in order to foster the “highest good” – the piety and the justice that maximize virtue as the source of the health or salvation of the soul. Hobbes reacted by leading the way to the implementation of a new, drastically lowered, conception of the goals of government. Hobbes was the first to propose a conception of civic justice and the common good that removed from civic purview the whole question of the good life, in the sense of spiritual fulfillment.