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Download as PDF; Printable version; ... was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book ... and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. ...
Life is but a motion of limbs. For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer? [14] The preface of Thomas Hobbe's Leviathan, read from Hobbes' Latin version, with English subtitles
In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson uses the phrase bellum omnium in omnia ("war of all things against all things", assuming omnium is intended to be neuter like omnia) as he laments that the constitution of that state was twice at risk of being sacrificed to the nomination of a dictator after the manner of the Roman Republic.
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).
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).
Hobbes posits a primitive, unconnected state of nature in which men, having a "natural proclivity ... to hurt each other" also have "a Right to every thing, even to one anothers body"; [124] and "nothing can be Unjust" in this "warre of every man against every man" in which human life is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." [125]
The novel's protagonist, Roy Complain, lives in a culturally primitive tribe on a massive generation ship, which has descended into an uncivilized state. The ship is overgrown by vegetation, and the inhabitants have clustered into warring tribes. In Roy's tribe, curiosity is discouraged, and life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The reader is forced to consider the extent to which such an environment suffocates all hope of virtue, self-development and decency. We see that despite the best efforts of Father Sturt and Dicky himself, the boy is dragged back from hope of a respectable future into a life of crime that is nasty, brutish and short.