ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously boasted that the science of politics was no older than his own work De Cive. While many readers, from his time to ours, have objected to his absolutist conclusions (Lawson 1657: I.4-5; Locke 1690; Gauthier 1969: 169-70), his attempt to lay a sound scientific foundation for those conclusions is widely recognized. His appreciation for the method of Euclidean geometry and his admiration of his contemporary fellow natural philosopher Galileo speaks to Hobbes’s commitment to a scientific understanding, not just of the non-human natural world, but of the human social world. Hobbes argued that persons characterized by a realistic human psychology in the social circumstances we typically face would find their rational interests best served by jointly submitting to the authority of an undivided, unlimited, absolute sovereign authority; further, such submission is dictated to them as a matter of moral and religious duty. Some interpreters have taken Hobbes to have offered a powerful early version of Social Contract theory, later developed by Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls. Others have viewed Hobbes as having modernized his inherited natural law tradition.
