Who Was Thomas Hobbes and What Was He Afraid Of?

Hobbes: Fear, Power and Faction · Episode 1 of 3 · Complete series

The first episode in our Hobbes trilogy asks how a life overshadowed by instability shaped one of the most powerful arguments for political order in the history of ideas.

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, and later joked that fear was his twin. His mature political philosophy emerged from a Europe marked by religious conflict and from the crisis of the English Civil Wars. In Leviathan (1651), fear is not merely a private emotion. It becomes a force capable of driving people both into conflict and towards the creation of a common authority.

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Fear as a political problem

Hobbes’s reputation can make his philosophy seem like a confession of personal pessimism. Yet the opening question is larger than whether he was a fearful man. What happens when people cannot rely on a common authority to protect them? Even someone who would prefer a peaceful life must consider what others might do. Anticipation, suspicion and the search for safety can make conflict intelligible without making it desirable.

Read a life alongside an argument

The episode pairs John Aubrey’s account of Hobbes with the author’s preface to De Cive. These are different kinds of evidence. Aubrey offers a portrait of a person, with habits, relationships and a remembered life. Hobbes’s preface explains how he wants his political argument to be approached. Reading them together helps us connect an intellectual life with its historical setting while resisting the temptation to explain every philosophical claim through a biographical anecdote.

From insecurity to common authority

The important transition is from vulnerability to political construction. Fear can separate people, but the wish to avoid violent death also gives them a reason to seek peace. The difficult question is how that shared wish becomes a durable arrangement. An agreement must do more than express good intentions: it must change what people can reasonably expect of one another. That problem carries the series into the second conversation on covenant and sovereignty.

Read alongside the episode

Aubrey, John. “Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury.” In Brief Lives, edited by Andrew Clark, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898. Read online.

Hobbes, Thomas. De Cive. Author’s Preface. English translation published as Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1651. Read the preface.

Further reading: Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Word count: 377 words (introduction, episode outline, reading commentary and discussion question).