Hobbes said fear was his twin, born alongside him as the Armada approached
Thomas Hobbes arrived early, in April 1588, reportedly because his mother panicked at news of the approaching Spanish Armada. He later joked that she bore twins, himself and fear. Fear of disorder shaped his Leviathan of 1651, which argued that only an absolute sovereign could keep people from a war of all against all.
Hobbes was born in Westport, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. His father, a poorly educated vicar, fled after brawling with local clergy outside his church, and a wealthy uncle who made gloves took charge of the family. Before going up to Oxford the boy translated Euripides's Medea from Greek into Latin verse; he found the scholastic teaching there dull and followed his own reading, taking his degree at Cambridge in 1608.
A tutoring job with the Cavendish family became a lifelong connection and his route into Europe. A grand tour from 1610 to 1615 introduced him to newer scientific methods. In 1628 he published the first English version of Thucydides translated directly from a Greek manuscript, calling its author the most political historian who ever wrote. He briefly took dictation for Francis Bacon, visited Galileo in Florence in 1636 while the astronomer was under house arrest, and joined Marin Mersenne's debating circle in Paris.
Feeling exposed as Parliament and king moved toward conflict, he fled to Paris in 1640 and stayed eleven years. There he wrote objections to Descartes's Meditations, a later exchange ended their correspondence altogether, and in 1647 he taught mathematics to the exiled Prince of Wales. Surviving a near-fatal illness that year, he finished Leviathan by 1650, likening the state to a giant made of people, built out of need and torn apart by passion.
His scheme was grand: explain physical bodies through motion, then human sensation and emotion, then society itself. He also wrote on geometry, optics, law and theology, and faced charges of atheism. He died on 4 December 1679, and is counted among the founders of modern political philosophy.
Source: Thomas Hobbes
