Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher born in Malmesbury who said his mother went into labor from fear of the Spanish Armada. He spent most of his life as tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, traveled on the Continent, met Galileo, and fled to Paris in 1640 as civil war approached, there tutoring the future Charles II and writing Leviathan, published in 1651. Its argument that men in a state of nature live in constant war and must surrender their liberty to an absolute sovereign offended royalists and republicans alike and was denounced as atheism. He translated Thucydides and, in his eighties, Homer, and lived to ninety-one.