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In this state, every person has a natural right to do anything one thinks necessary for preserving one's own life, and life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, Chapters XIII–XIV).
Thomas Hobbes (/ hɒbz / HOBZ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. [4] He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. [5][6]
According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without leadership or the concept of sovereignty).
Leviathan at Wikisource. Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in 1651 (revised Latin edition 1668). [1][5][6] Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan. The work concerns the structure of society ...
Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning " the war of all against all ", is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state-of-nature thought experiment that he conducts in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). The common modern English usage is a war of " each against all " where war is rare and terms such as ...
He also very influentially described man's natural state (without science and artifice) as one where life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". [82] Following him, John Locke 's philosophy of empiricism also saw human nature as a tabula rasa .
In the poem "An Essay on Man" (1734), the poet Alexander Pope developed the noble savage into the non-European Other.(Jonathan Richardson, c. 1736)18th century. By the 18th century, Montaigne's predecessor to the noble savage, nature's gentleman was a stock character usual to the sentimental literature of the time, for which a type of non-European Other became a background character for ...
Hobbes believed that this would be a violent and anarchic, calling life under such a state of affairs "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". [76] To prevent this, he believed that the sovereign of the state should have essentially unlimited power. [79]