Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely in 1588, several months before the Spanish Armada set sail in an attempt to invade England and restore Catholic hegemony in Europe. Hobbes later said that his mother “gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” Although he famously described human existence as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Hobbes would live a productive and long life, dying in 1679 at the age of 91. Between 1610 and 1615, he was on a grand tour of Europe, where he was exposed to Continental scientific and critical methods differing from the scholasticism he had learned at Oxford. Hobbes was expert in the classical languages, and in 1628 he produced the first translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War from a Greek manuscript. He served as Bacon’s amanuensis for a time.

Hobbes sought to establish a “science of politics,” through a geometric method. His writings led to accusations of atheism from his opponents. His great problem was how to prevent civil war. Hobbes lived through the catastrophic years of the English Civil War (1642–1651), which overlapped with the conflagration on the Continent, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). His most important work, Leviathan (1651 in English; 1668 in Latin), is one of the masterpieces of political theory and the greatest work of political philosophy in the English language. This book is also credited with inventing the idea of the social contract, which would decisively shape all of modern political theory. Hobbes helped to theoretically secure the absolute sovereignty of the modern nation state.