Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes said that he and fear were born twins: his mother, hearing that the Spanish Armada was coming, went into premature labour. He was educated at Oxford and became tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, a post he held for sixty years. At forty he happened on Euclid, was captivated by the necessity of geometrical proof, and resolved to apply the method to human beings and society. He travelled the Continent three times, met Galileo, disputed with Descartes and served as secretary to Bacon.

In 1640, on the eve of the English Civil War, he fled to Paris after writing in defence of the crown and lived there eleven years, tutoring the exiled prince Charles in mathematics. Leviathan appeared in 1651 and enraged everyone: royalists because it derived sovereignty from contract rather than divine right, churchmen because of its materialism and its dissection of religion, parliamentarians because it upheld absolute power. He fled back to England and submitted to Cromwell's government. After the Restoration Charles II protected him but forbade him to publish on politics again.

His system starts from body: everything is matter in motion, thought is motion in the brain, will is the last appetite. In a state of nature with no common power, everyone has a right to everything, and the result is a war of all against all in which life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. For self-preservation people covenant to transfer all their rights to a sovereign, an artificial 'Leviathan' whose power must be undivided and irresistible, or civil war returns. He lived to ninety-one and translated Homer in old age.