Welcome back to another deep dive. Today, we
are opening a file that feels, I don't know,
less like a philosophy lecture and more like
a warning label for the entire human race. That's
a good way to put it. We are tackling a figure
who is, frankly, the bad boy of 17th century
thought. We're talking about a man whose ideas
were so controversial, so unsettling, that for
a long time, his name was basically a dirty word
in polite society. Oh, absolutely. We are talking
about Thomas Hobbes. It is a name that inevitably
comes up whenever you talk about power or government
or just, you know, the darker alleys of human
psychology. But you're right. He was a pariah.
If you called someone a Hobbes in the 1670s.
You weren't complimenting their intellect. No.
You were calling them a godless, cynical monster.
Which, I have to admit, makes me like him already.
But usually people just know the catchphrases.
They know nasty, brutish, and short. They know
the Leviathan. And they kind of leave it at that.
Exactly. And the mission for this deep dive is
to get past the bumper stickers. We have a massive
stack of notes here, biographical details, the
dense text of Leviathan itself, accounts of his
legendary and frankly petty feuds, and the bloody
history of the English Civil War. Right. We want
to understand why he thought the world was such
a terrifying place and why he thought the only
solution was a totalitarian monster he called
the Leviathan. And it seems like to understand
that fear, we had to go right back to the beginning,
literally to the day he was born, April 5, 1588.
The setting is incredibly cinematic. You have
to picture England in a state of absolute panic.
This isn't just a rainy Tuesday. The Spanish
Armada is approaching. The most powerful invasion
fleet in the world is sailing up the channel
to conquer England, and the whole country is
bracing for what looks like the apocalypse. The
tension is just off the charts. National anxiety
level at a million. A million, yeah. And in Westport,
Wiltshire, Hobbes' mother hears the news of the
approaching Armada. She is so utterly terrified
by the prospect of invasion that she goes into
labor prematurely. So he is literally born into
a national panic attack. Precisely. Hobbes himself
later wrote a famous line about this in his autobiography.
He said, My mother gave birth to twins, myself
and fear. Myself and fear. Wow, that really sets
the tone, doesn't it? It's not just a witty anecdote
to break the ice at parties. Not at all. It feels
like the thesis statement for his entire life.
It really is. Fear wasn't just an emotion for
Hobbes. It was the engine of his philosophy.
It was, for him, the fundamental reality of human
existence. If you look at his life from that
very first day, he is constantly running from
chaos, running from violence, and trying to build
this mental fortress to keep it all out. He's
trying to solve the problem of fear. That's his
whole project. And it wasn't just the Spanish
Armada providing the chaos. His own family. situation
was pretty unstable, right? I was looking at
the notes on his father, Thomas Hobbes Sr., and
this is not exactly the picture of a dignified
Stoic clergyman. No, not at all. Far from it.
His father was the vicar of Charlton and Westport,
but the records we have suggest he was uneducated
and, to quote one source, he disesteemed learning.
Disesteemed learning. What does that even mean
for a vicar? It means he could probably read
the service, and that was about it. He wasn't
a scholar. He wasn't an intellectual. He was,
by all accounts, a bit of a hothead. And that
leads to the inciting incident for the family.
It does. It came when Thomas Sr. got into a fight.
A theological debate. A scholarly disagreement.
No, a physical fight. A brawl. With another clergyman.
Right outside his own church. Wait, wait. He
got into a fistfight with another priest right
outside the church doors. Yes, in the churchyard,
all places. And the scandal was so bad that he
was excommunicated and forced to flee London.
And in doing so, he just abandons the family.
He abandoned them. He left his wife and three
kids, including young Thomas, behind to fend
for themselves, just vanished. That is heavy.
So Hobbes is abandoned by his father because
of a violent, irrational outburst that has to
shape your view of human nature. How could it
not? You see authority figures, people who are
supposed to be moral leaders behaving like thugs.
You learn that the people in charge aren't necessarily
good or even rational. It absolutely does. It
reinforces that idea that underneath the robes,
underneath the titles, people are volatile. They're
driven by passions, not by reason. But, as is
often the case in these stories, a savior stepped
in. A relative. Hobbes had a wealthy uncle named
Francis. The glove manufacturer. That's the one.
Francis was a successful glover, quite well off,
with no family of his own, and he took over the
care and education of young Thomas. And this
is crucial. Right. Because without Uncle Francis'
glove money, we probably never would have heard
of Thomas Hobbes. He would have just been another
poor kid in Wiltshire with an abandoned family.
Because that money bought him a top -tier education.
He goes to school in Malmesbury, then a private
school, and eventually he heads to Oxford, Magdalene
Hall. Now, I imagine a future philosopher would
be in heaven at Oxford, but the notes say he
wasn't exactly a model student. He was a good
pupil in terms of his ability. I mean, he was
brilliant, but he hated the curriculum. He found
it profoundly boring. Okay, so you have to understand,
at that time, Oxford was dominated by scholastic
logic. Scholasticism. We hear that term a lot.
Break it down for us. What was he actually sitting
through in class? What were these debates about?
It was very Aristotle heavy, very traditional,
and very, very focused on abstract theological
definitions. They would spend weeks, literally
weeks, debating the essence of an object or the
nature of substance versus accident. Give me
an example. What's a scholastic argument? Okay,
so they might argue about how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin, or they debate the
metaphysics of the Eucharist. To Hobbes, it felt
like word games. He thought it was just jargon
designed to confuse people and that had absolutely
nothing to do with the real physical world. So
he basically checked out and followed his own
curriculum. Pretty much. He wasn't interested
in the stuffy lectures. He was spending his time
at book binders, looking at maps, reading histories
of exploration. This is the first real sign of
his intellectual rebellion. Right. He was rejecting
the wisdom of the ancients, specifically Aristotle,
which was a dangerous, almost heretical thing
to do in a university. setting at that time.
He thought the old philosophy was just cobwebs
that needed to be swept away. So he graduates
from Cambridge in 1608, and then he lands a job
that basically sets him up for life. He becomes
a tutor. But not just any tutor. He is recommended
to the Cavendish family, the Earls of Devonshire.
This is one of the most powerful, wealthy, and
influential families in all of England. And this
wasn't a short gig. He was with them for life.
Practically. He started by tutoring William Cavendish,
who would become the second Earl of Devonshire,
and then later he tutored his son, the third
Earl. He even had a hand in tutoring the generation
after that. This connection was his lifeline.
It gave him everything. Everything. A massive
library, financial security, powerful protection,
and most importantly, travel. The Grand Tour.
Exactly. Between 1610 and 1615, he travels all
over Europe with the young William Cavendish.
And this is where the real transformation happens.
He leaves the stuffy, backward -looking atmosphere
of Oxford and steps into the vibrant, intellectual
world of the continent. This is where he starts
moving away from just philosophy. Yeah. And gets
deep into science and critical methods. The scientific
revolution is happening in real time all around
him. It is. He's in France. He's in Italy. He's
meeting people who are actually measuring the
world, not just arguing about what Aristotle
said about it. And there is one meeting in particular
on a later tour that stands out in all the sources.
He met Galileo. He met Galileo in 1636. He visited
him in Florence. While Galileo was under house
arrest by the Inquisition. Yes. For saying the
earth moves around the sun. Imagine that. scene,
you have Hobbes, this guy who is desperately
looking for a new certain way to explain the
world, meaning the very man who would revolutionize
the understanding of the physical universe. And
Galileo had done it with math. He had shown that
the planets move according to precise, predictable
mathematical law, laws of motion, inertia, velocity.
Right. The universe wasn't being pushed around
by angels or mystical forces. It was matter in
motion. And you could understand it. And Hobbes
has an aha. A life -changing insight. A massive
one. He thinks, if we can explain the movement
of planets with geometry and physics, why can't
we explain human beings the same way? So humans
as matter in motion. Precisely. He starts to
view human beings not as souls with divine sparks,
but as biological machines. We are matter. We
are driven by push and pull. Desire or appetite
pushes us towards something. Fear or aversion
pulls us away from something else. It's just
mechanics. It's all mechanics. And if you can
understand the mechanics of human nature, you
can build a perfect state, a machine state, a
government that works as predictably as a clock.
So he wants to apply geometry to politics. He
wants to solve the problem of society like it's
a math equation. That is his grand ambition.
He wants a political science that is as certain
and undeniable as a geometric proof. If A equals
B and B equals C, then we must have a king. He
wants to remove all the guesswork, all the emotion,
all the religion. Just cold, hard logic. The
hardest logic he can find. But before he can
finish this grand logical theory, reality intervenes
again. The chaos he's always running from comes
home. The English Civil War. OK, let's unpack
the context here because it's crucial. We are
moving into the 1640s. England is a tinderbox.
You have the parliamentarians on one side, the
royalists on the other. It's a religious and
political power struggle that is going to tear
the country apart. And Hobbes, with his incredible
sensitivity to danger, remember the twins, himself
and fear, he smells the smoke before the fire
really takes hold. In 1640, the political situation
deteriorates rapidly. The short parliament is
dissolved. The long parliament begins. and Hobbes
feels that he is in danger. Why him specifically?
He had written a treatise not for publication,
but it was circulating in manuscript form. It
was called The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic,
and it was a very forceful defense of the king's
absolute authority. And in the current climate,
with Parliament challenging the king, having
your name on a document that says the king is
the boss, period. was a dangerous thing. Very
dangerous. Parliament was flexing its muscles
and men who supported the king were being targeted.
So, true to his nature, Hobbes flees. He goes
to Paris in November 1640 and he doesn't come
back for 11 years. So he sits out the entire
Civil War in exile. He does. But he isn't just
sitting around in Parisian cafes eating croissants.
He is watching the news from home with absolute
horror. He sees his country descending into the
exact anarchy he always feared. It wasn't just
a political disagreement. It was a bloodbath.
It was a total societal breakdown. Neighbors
fighting neighbors, the breakdown of law, of
order, of everything. And eventually the unthinkable
happens. The king, Charles I, is captured, tried,
and executed. Regicide. They chop off the head
of the king. For a man like Hobbes, who believed
in absolute undivided authority, seeing the head
of the state literally chopped off was like watching
the sun fall out of the sky. it confirmed his
absolute worst fears. When authority crumbles,
society dissolves into a war of all against all.
And while he's in Paris, he actually gets a very
high -profile student, right? Yes. In 1646, he
becomes the mathematical instructor to the young
Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, who was
also living in exile after his father's defeat.
That is a connection that will save his neck
later on. But let's focus on the writing. This
exile period is the crucible for his masterpiece,
Boviathan. It is. You have to understand, Leviathan
isn't written in a quiet, peaceful ivory tower.
It's a survival guide for a shattered nation.
Hobbes is looking at the carnage of the Civil
War and asking, how do we stop this from ever,
ever happening again? And there was a personal
element of urgency, too. He nearly died of an
illness in 1647, right? Yes. He was bedridden
for six months with a severe fever. He thought
he was dying. And I think that brush with death
added this incredible sense of urgency. He needed
to get the solution down on paper. He felt he
had the answer to perpetual peace, and he had
to publish it before he or his country died for
good. So let's dive into the book itself. Leviathan?
Published in 1651, it starts with this famous
thought experiment. He strips everything away.
Government, laws, police, society. He deletes
it all to see what's left. He wants to see what
human nature is in its raw, unfiltered state.
He calls it the state of nature. Right. And unlike
some other philosophers who think, oh, without
rules, people would be noble savages living in
harmony. Hobbes has a very, very different view.
He has a materialist view. Remember, we are machines
driven by appetites and aversions. In the state
of nature, every single person has what he calls
a right to everything. A right to everything.
That sounds liberating. It sounds great for about
five seconds until you realize everyone else
has it too. If I want your food, I have a right
to take it. If you want my shelter, you have
a right to take it. There is no mine in mine.
There is no property. There is just, can I take
it and can I keep it? And since everyone generally
wants the same things, food, safety, resources.
You get conflict. Constant, unavoidable conflict.
Hobbes famously calls it bellum omnium contra
omnes, the war of all against all. And it's not
that everyone is evil necessarily. That's a common
misreading. It's a very common misreading. He's
not saying we're all psychopaths. He's saying
the situation itself, the logic of the situation
makes us killers. Imagine there are two of you
and one apple. There's no referee. The rational
thing to do is fight for it. And because there's
no referee, there can be no trust. This is the
key concept. Dividends. Exactly. Even if you
are a nice person, you can't trust that I'm a
nice person. You have to assume I might kill
you in your sleep to take your stuff. So, your
best strategy, your most rational move, is to
kill me first. A preemptive strike. It becomes
a spiral of paranoia and violence. It's the prisoner's
dilemma played out on a global societal scale.
Nobody wants this war, but everyone is forced
to participate in it to survive. And this leads
to that famous devastating passage. I have it
here. He describes what is missing in this state.
He says, in such condition, there is no place
for industry, no culture of the earth, no navigation,
no commodious building, no arts, no letters,
no society. He is describing the total collapse
of civilization. You can't build a house because
someone will take it. You can't plant a crop
because someone will steal it. No infrastructure,
no trade, no art, just moment to moment survival.
And then the kicker, the line everyone knows,
and which is worst of all. Continual fear and
danger of violent death and the life of man,
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Nasty,
brutish and short. It is one of the most powerful
and bleak descriptions of human misery ever written.
And for Hobbes, looking across the channel at
the Civil War, this wasn't an abstract fantasy.
He was seeing it happen. He was saying this is
the default setting of humanity if we don't have
a lid on us. OK, so if the state of nature is
a horror show, how do we get out? What is the
escape hatch? Reason. Fear drives us into this
mess, but reason guides us out. We are rational
animals. We realize that living in constant fear
of being murdered is a terrible way to live.
We want safety. We want to be able to farm our
land without someone stealing the harvest. We
want to live. We want to live. So we make a deal,
a contract, the famous social contract. How does
the deal work? What are the terms and conditions?
The first step is that we all agree to lay down
our right to everything. I agree not to kill
you for your shoes, provided you agree not to
kill me for mine. It's a mutual disarmament.
We give up our natural liberty to do whatever
we want. But wait, that feels slimsy. If I promise
not to kill you, what stops me from breaking
that promise the moment your back is turned and
I see an opportunity? That is the crucial point.
That's the million dollar question. And Hobbes
has a famous line for that, too. He says. Covenants
without the sword are but words and of no strength
to secure a man at all. Promises mean nothing
if there isn't a force to back them up. Nothing.
You can't trust me. I can't trust you. We need
an enforcer, a third party with overwhelming
power to punish anyone who breaks the deal. Enter
the Leviathan. The sovereign. We take all that
power we had in the state of nature, the right
to judge, the right to punish, the right to make
war, and we hand it all over to one central authority.
Whether it's a man or an assembly of men. We
give all our power to one entity. We authorize
him. We say, you keep the peace. You punish the
rule breakers. You hold the sword. And in exchange,
we will obey you absolutely. And the visual for
this is iconic. The friendliest piece of the
book, the cover image. It is unforgettable. It
shows this giant king, a colossal figure, towering
over the landscape, holding a sword in one hand
and a bishop's crozier in the other. Symbolizing
his control over both civil and religious power.
Exactly. But if you look closely at the engraving,
his body isn't made of armor or skin. It is made
of thousands and thousands of tiny little people,
all facing inward, looking up at the head. That's
us, the citizens. Yes. We are the Leviathan.
We created him from our collective will. We authorized
him. He acts with our collective strength. We
are the body. He is the soul. But the catch is,
this power has to be absolute. Right. Hobbes
doesn't want checks and balances. He's not Montesquieu.
He hates checks and balances. He loathes them.
He looks at the English Civil War and says, why
did this happen? Because power was divided. You
had the king on one side, parliament on the other.
You had the church making claims against the
state. When you have two bosses, you have conflict.
You have civil war. For Hobbes, power must be
absolute and undivided. The sovereign controls
the military, the judiciary, the laws, what can
be published, what can be taught in universities,
and even the church. Even a church. That seems
like a massive overreach, especially for the
17th century. Especially the church. Hobbes saw
religious disagreement as a primary cause of
civil war. If the pope tells you to do one thing
and the king tells you to do another, who do
you obey? That division leads to bloodshed. So
the solution? The sovereign must decide what
religious doctrines are to be taught. The sovereign
controls the pulpit to ensure that the messages
always, always obey the law. Religion becomes
a tool of the state to ensure peace. That seems
intense. So let me play devil's advocate. What
if the sovereign is a tyrant? What if he's a
bad king? Can we revolt? Can we have a revolution?
Yeah. That's a short answer. It's an absolute
answer. Under Hobbes' system, you cannot revolt.
Why? Because you authorized the sovereign. You
created him. To attack the sovereign is to attack
yourself. It's illogical. So you're basically
attacking the peace you created. You are voting
to return to the state of nature. And more importantly,
Hobbes would ask you, is the tyrant worse than
the Civil War? Is paying high taxes worse than
having your throat cut by your neighbor? And
for him, the answer is always no. Always no.
Any government, no matter how oppressive, is
better than the war of all against all. The only
time you can resist is if the sovereign tries
to kill you directly. The right to self -preservation
is the one right you can never give up. But other
than that, you obey. You sit down, you pay your
taxes, and you obey. So he publishes this book,
Leviathan, in 1651. He probably thought, I have
solved politics. Everyone is going to thank me
for bringing logic to the chaos. He might have
thought that. He certainly had the ego for it.
But in reality, he managed to achieve something
truly impressive. What's that? He angered absolutely
everyone, all sides, all factions. Okay, let's
break down the backlash. Who was mad at him and
why? Well, start with the royalists. These are
supposed to be his people. He's in exile with
them in Paris. He's teaching the future king.
But they hated Leviathan. Why? I don't get it.
He was arguing for an absolute king. That should
be their jam. Yes, but he was arguing for it
for all the wrong reasons. The royalists believed
in the divine right of kings, that God puts the
king on the throne and he answers only to God.
Hobbes said, No, the people put the king on the
throne through a contract because they're scared
of dying. That takes all the magic, all the divinity
out of it. It makes monarchy a pragmatic solution,
not a divine institution. It makes it transactional.
It makes the king an employee of the people's
safety in a weird way. Exactly. And worse, much
worse, Hobbes argued that your obligation to
obey a sovereign only lasts as long as he can
protect you. So if a sovereign loses a war, and
a new power takes over. So if the parliamentarians
win the Civil War and establish control. Hobbes'
logic implies you should obey them now. Because
they're the ones holding the sword. They're the
ones who can protect you. This looked like treason
to the royalists in exile. They thought he was
writing a justification for submitting to Oliver
Cromwell and the new revolutionary government
back in London. Wow. So the royalists hate him.
What about the church? The Anglicans? The Catholics?
They hated him even more, if that's possible.
Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, they all
found something to despise in Leviathan. It was
an equal opportunity offender. Completely. He
subordinated the church to the state, which they
hated. He interpreted scripture in a very bizarre,
materialistic way that stripped the supernatural
out of religion. He just gave off this secularist
spirit that terrified them. It got so bad that
he was actually in physical danger in Paris,
right, from the English court in exile. The royalists
might have had him arrested or worse. The French
Catholic authorities were also deeply suspicious
of the book's irreligious tone. He was effectively
banished from the court of the exiled King Charles.
So ironically, the man who fled England to escape
the war had to flee back to England in the winter
of 1651 because his allies in Paris wanted his
head. That's incredible. He returns to London,
submits to Cromwell's Council of State, and is
allowed to retire to private life. But the controversy
didn't stop. Hobbism became a thing. It became
a slur. It was a McCarthyism of the 17th century.
If you wanted to call someone immoral, atheistic,
cynical, or someone who believed makes right,
you called them a Hobbist. And the atheist label
stuck to him like glue for the rest of his life.
Was he an atheist? It is a very complicated question.
In the 17th century, the word atheist was a much
broader term than it is today. It could just
mean you disagreed with the church's official
view of divine providence. It was an all -purpose
insult for a heretic. Exactly. Hobbes himself
always claimed to be a Christian. He wrote extensively
about scripture, but his theology was, well,
it was unique. Unique, how? Materialism, again.
For Hobbes, if something exists, it has to have
a body. has to take up space. So he argued that
everything is matter, corporeal. That includes
the soul. And it even includes God. He argued
that God is made of matter. Yeah. That God is
a physical being. He argued that to be a substance
means to be a body. He said the phrase incorporeal
substance, which theologians use to describe
God and the soul, was a contradiction in terms,
like calling something a round square. He said
it was just meaningless noise. I can see why
the bishops were reaching for the pitchforks.
It was profoundly scandalous, and it got very,
very real for him in 1666. After the Restoration,
when Charles II came back to the throne, a couple
of disasters hit London. The Great Plague, 1665,
and then the Great Fire of London in 1666. And
when bad things happen in the 1600s, people look
for a sinner to blame. Exactly. The popular consensus
was that God was angry at England for its sins,
so Parliament introduced a bill against atheism
and profaneness. The committee formed was specifically
empowered to receive information about books
that tended to atheism in particular. The book
of Mr. Hobbes called The Leviathan. So they named
him and his book in a parliamentary bill. That
must have triggered his old friend fear. He was
terrified, genuinely terrified. The penalty for
heresy could still be public execution, burning
at the stake. He actually burned some of his
own papers, compromising manuscripts just to
be safe. Wow. He wrote a defense arguing that
there was no court in England that could legally
try him for heresy anymore. But for a while,
he was looking over his shoulder, thinking the
authorities were coming for him. The bill didn't
lead to his execution, but it did silence him,
didn't it? It did. The king, his former pupil
Charles II, protected him from any real harm.
But part of the deal was that Hobbes was forbidden
from publishing anything on politics or human
conduct in England ever again. He had to print
his later works in Amsterdam and have them smuggled
into the country. So we have the political drama,
but we also have to talk about the feuds. Because
Hobbes seems to have been the kind of guy who
just couldn't let an argument go. He was a fighter.
He was incredibly stubborn, and he picked fights
with real experts in their own fields. He had
this intellectual arrogance where he believed
his system, his geometric method, could explain
everything better than the specialists. Let's
start with Bishop Bramhall, the fight over free
will. Right. This was the great philosophical
battle. Bramhall was a bishop, a strong believer
in traditional free will, the idea that humans
have a soul that can freely choose between good
and evil. Hobbes, true to his mechanistic view,
was a strict determinist. Explain that. Psychological
determinism. Right. He believed that our will
is nothing more than the last appetite or aversion
we feel before we act. It's the final link in
a causal chain. If you choose an apple over a
pear, it's not because of some magical free choice.
It's because the physical chain of causes and
effects in your brain, your hunger, your memories,
your body chemistry, resulted in the appetite
for the apple being stronger. So liberty for
Hobbes just means you're not physically stopped
from doing something. Exactly. Liberty is the
absence of external impediments. A river is free
to flow downhill. You are free to walk out a
door if it isn't locked. It doesn't mean you
could have chosen to desire something else. And
this debate got messy. Very. It was supposed
to be a private exchange of papers, but Bramhall's
side published it without Hobbes' permission.
This led to a public war of words that went on
for years. Bramhall wrote a book with the amazing
title The Catching of Leviathan the Great Whale.
That's a great title. Hobbes replied with the
questions concerning liberty, necessity, and
chance, and the records say he replied with astonishing
force. He did not hold back. But if the Bramhall
feud was an intellectual heavyweight match...
The feud with John Wallace was, well, it was
almost a comedy routine. It is tragic comedy.
It really is. John Wallace was a brilliant mathematician,
a civilian professor of geometry at Oxford. He
was one of the founders of the Royal Society,
a legitimate genius. And Hobbes dabbled in math.
Dabbled is the right word. And Hobbes became
convinced that he had solved one of the great
impossible problems of ancient geometry. Squaring
the circle. Explain what that is for the listener
who hasn't touched a protractor in 20 years.
It's the challenge to construct a square with
the exact same area as a given circle, using
only a compass and a straight edge. For reasons
related to the transcendental nature of pi, we
now know it's mathematically impossible. But
Hobbes didn't know that. No, and in his book
De Corpor in 1655, he published his solution.
He thought he had cracked a 2 ,000 -year -old
code. And what did Wallace, the actual mathematician,
think? Wallace tore him to shreds. He publicly
and brutally exposed Hobbes' many mathematical
errors. A normal person, a humble person, would
have said, oops, my bad, I'm a political philosopher,
not a geometer, I'll stick to my lane. But not
Hobbes. Never Hobbes. He doubled down. He refused
to admit his mistake. He fought with John Wallace
in public print for 25 years. 25 years. Over
a math problem he got wrong. A quarter of a century
of arguing about geometry. He wrote pamphlet
after pamphlet attacking Wallace's absurd geometry
and even criticized his rural language, basically
making fun of his grammar. He criticized his
grammar in a math debate. He criticized everything.
He called Wallace's work a scab of symbols. It
was a flame war, 17th century style played out
in Latin. And Hobbes refused to admit he was
wrong until the day he died. What does that tell
us about him? Is it just monumental ego? It is
ego, certainly. He had a massive ego. But I think
it's also something deeper. It's his commitment
to his system. He wanted everything to fit into
his logical, geometric worldview. If his geometry
was proven to be flawed, he feared it might imply
his politics were flawed, too. He needed the
world to be logical and solvable. And admitting
error was like pulling a thread that could unravel
the whole tapestry. He needed certainty in a
chaotic world, even if he had to invent it himself.
So despite the stress of being England's most
notorious philosopher and fighting with math
professors, the man had incredible longevity.
He really did. He lived to be 91 years old in
the 17th century. That is extraordinary. And
he had a protector in high places until the end.
King Charles II, his former student. The king
couldn't let him publish his controversial works,
but he seemed to have a genuine affection for
his old tutor. The king famously called Hobbes
the bear because he was always being baited into
fights by his enemies. They liked him. He liked
him. He gave Hobbes a pension of 100 pounds a
year and kept his portrait in his private closet
at court. That royal favor probably kept him
from any real harm. He spent his final years
with the Cavendish family at their estates, mostly
at Chatsworth House. And he kept working right
to the end. He couldn't stop. It's astounding.
At age 84, he wrote his autobiography in Latin
verse. Just showing off. Completely. And then,
because he said he had nothing else to do in
his late 80s, he decided to translate both the
Iliad and the Odyssey into English verse. The
entire Homeric epics. In his late 80s. Yes. The
notes here call them rugged rhymes. They aren't
considered the greatest translations, but the
fact that he did it at all is just staggering.
It shows his mind was sharp and active until
the very end. And then the end comes. Yeah. October
1679. You had a bladder disorder and then a paralytic
stroke. He died at Hardwick Hall, another Cavendish
estate, on December 4, 1679. And his final words
were recorded by those around him. A great leap
in the dark. It's poignant, isn't it? For a man
who spent 91 years trying to construct a system
of absolute certainty, trying to banish fear
with inescapable logic, his final moment is facing
the ultimate unknown. A great leap in the dark.
So let's zoom out. We unpack the life, the book,
the feuds. What is the legacy? Why does this
matter to you, the listener today? We don't live
in an absolute monarchy. Most of us live in democracies.
We have rights. Is Hobbes just a historical relic?
Not at all. I think he's more relevant than ever.
The historian Christopher Hill put it really
well. He said Hobbes fundamentally shifted political
thought from obey the state because God says
so to obey the state because it's convenient
and safer than the alternative. He secularized
politics. He invented the modern state in a way.
The idea that government is a tool we create
for our own benefit, for our own security. Exactly.
He is the progenitor of what we call social structure.
the really hard, uncomfortable question, why
do you follow the law? Is it because you are
a naturally good person with a strong moral compass?
Or is it because you are terrified of what happens
when the law breaks down? It's the question that
comes up every time there's a blackout, a riot,
a natural disaster, a collapse of order. How
thin is the veneer of civilization? Hobbes says
it's paper thin. And that is why he is still
so unsettling. We like to think of ourselves
as evolved, moral, cooperative creatures. Hobbes
holds up a mirror and sees a scared, selfish
animal that needs a cage to feel safe. He challenges
us to accept that the state doesn't exist to
make us happy or virtuous or to help us achieve
our dreams. Its primary, and maybe only, function
is to keep us alive. to stop us from killing
each other. And if you look at the world today,
at failed states, at civil wars, at the fragility
of order in so many places, Hobbes is always
there in the background whispering, I told you
so. So here is the final provocative thought
for you to mull over as you go about your day.
Next time you are standing in line at the DMV
or paying your taxes or grumbling about some
bureaucratic rule you have to follow, imagine
the alternative. Imagine the twins. Imagine the
fear. Imagine the nasty, brutish, and short life
that Thomas Hobbes ran from for 91 years. And
ask yourself, maybe, just maybe, the Leviathan
isn't the monster. Maybe the monster is us. That
is the deep dive. Thanks for listening. We'll
see you next time.