In his masterpiece “ Leviathan” (1651), he explains why violence is such a risk by establishing a bleak view of humans, who will always be destructively at odds over their interests. Hobbes built his theory of statecraft precisely because his world was terrifyingly lethal. Panicking that he was for the chop as a royalist, he fled to France in 1640, and had a too-close-for-comfort brush with charges of heresy later in his life. His mother went into labor in 1588 on hearing news that the Spanish Armada was readying to attack England, and the notoriously funny and affable Hobbes later quipped: “Fear and I were born twins together.”Ĭrucially, he knew terror throughout his life, during which the fratricidal English Civil War (and even more cataclysmic Thirty Years’ War) loomed large. Fear of violence is the keystone of his political thinking. In his masterpiece “Leviathan” (1651), he explains why violence is such a risk by establishing a bleak view of humans, who will always be destructively at odds over their interests.
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