Thomas Hobbes was born into a family of clothiers in 1588 – the year of the Spanish Armada as he notes in his “Verse Autobiography”. His father was the curate of Brokenborough, but after a series of conflicts was formally excommunicated from the Church and disappeared from his family’s lives. After early local schooling, Hobbes matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1603 and was admitted BA in 1608.

Hobbes stressed the intellectual poverty of his Oxford education in his Verse Autobiography. He seems, though, to have been viewed as a successful student as he was recommended in 1608 as tutor for William Cavendish, the future second Earl of Devonshire and scion of the wealthy family that he served on and off over the course of more than seventy years and in whose manor Hardwick Hall he died. Until Cavendish’s death in 1628, Hobbes acted as his tutor, companion, secretary, and assistant. During this time, Hobbes also performed secretarial duties for Francis Bacon and visited Venice, and in 1629 published his celebrated translation of Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War.

After a brief period out of the service of the Cavendish family in which Hobbes accompanied a teenage pupil to France and Geneva, he returned to Hardwick Hall to teach the third earl. It was in this period that Hobbes made the acquaintance of the earl of Newcastle, Devonshire’s cousin also named William Cavendish, and Newcastle’s brother Charles. Both were zealous and well-connected partisans of the new science. When Hobbes visited Paris and Italy with his pupil Devonshire, Newcastle’s and Charles’s contacts allowed him to meet Marin Mersenne and other important natural philosophers including, perhaps, Galileo.

Hobbes dedicated his first statement of his epistemology, mechanist psychology, and civil philosophy to Newcastle, who had convinced him to write it. The Elements of Law, Naturall and Politique was distributed in manuscript copies in May 1640 (but not printed until 1650). Hobbes left for Paris a six months later, likely due to feeling threatened by the radicalised Parliament. He stayed in Paris for the entirety of the English Civil War and vigorously embraced the cutting edge Parisian intellectual life surrounding Mersenne. Mersenne enrolled Hobbes to provide Objections to Descartes’ Meditations, which was given dismissive Replies. Mersenne also helped to publish and distribute Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Tertia De Cive in 1642, Hobbes’s second statement of his civil philosophy.

Leviathan appeared in May 1651. Later that year Hobbes presented it to Charles II, whom he had tutored in mathematics. Despite this, neither Leviathan nor Hobbes gained much traction in the court in exile. After the de facto end of the English Civil War with Charles II’s defeat at Worcester, Hobbes left France for England in December 1651. He had little trouble with the authorities until the Restoration. He feared being tried for blasphemy in his later years and was not able to publish on political subjects. For the remainder of his life Hobbes primarily wrote on natural philosophy and mathematics, including the notorious controversy with the algebraist John Wallis, all the while in the service of the Devonshire family in whose estate he died in 1679. The historical dialogue Behemoth appeared in the year of Hobbes’s death. A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England only appeared posthumously.

Hobbes’s views on natural law were not widely known prior to 1647. The Elements of Law was circulated only in hand copies and the first edition of De Cive was privately published. Grotius sought a copy of De Cive in 1643, but he was of course part of an intellectual elite exiled in Paris where the first edition was available. It was the second edition of De Cive, published in Amsterdam by Elzevier in 1647 with a new preface and some additional material, which brought Hobbes wide recognition although primarily on the Continent. Hobbes became famous and infamous to British audiences in 1651 through Leviathan, and secondarily as the author of Elements of Law and De Cive. Conversely, the Latin edition of Leviathan did not appear until 1668, twenty six years after De Cive, and only then had a Continental reception (helped also by the Dutch translation, 1667).

Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan had far more similarities than differences – the core definitions of natural law and the fundamental laws of nature are remarkably uniform. The major differences are between Leviathan and the two earlier works. Leviathan has a far more extended discussion of religion. And the distinctive account of sovereign authority in which the people author and authorize the sovereign’s actions is absent from the two earlier works.

Also, since De Cive was intended as the first work of a tripos (filled out by De Corpore (1655) and De Homine (1658)), it lacked the discussions of mind, knowledge, and mechanist psychology which introduce the other two works. As a consequence the philosophers in the Netherlands, Germany, and France who first encountered Hobbes through De Cive viewed the political philosophy as independent of Hobbes’s materialism in a way that their Leviathan-focused brethren in Britain did not. They also viewed Hobbes’s philosophy against a different background than the events unfolding in England. For example in 1647 the Thirty Years War with its unparalleled brutality was coming to an end. This meant that there were two different receptions of Hobbes’s civil philosophy, with De Cive as the cornerstone on the Continent and Leviathan in Britain. Perhaps due in part to these factors the Continental reception was often more positive than the British reception: the French translation of Elements of Law eventually even acquired the “Privilège du Roy”.

Thomas Hobbes is clearly a central thinker for understanding early modern natural law. All of the major natural lawyers discussed Hobbes and most attempted to exhibit his errors. He seemed to have been viewed by many of these readers as a modern Carneades or modern Epicurus rising again and in need of being refuted, despite Grotius’s efforts to dispense with him. Indeed, whether Hobbes is considered by a natural jurist to be properly a natural lawyer at all is a clue to the jurist’s view on what constitutes natural law.

Hobbes argued for core positions that natural lawyers wished to refute. His distinctive account of the state of nature as a war of all against all, the denial of natural morality prior to the establishment of a mutual contract, his arguments that the fundamental natural law had at its core pre-moral self-preservation, and what many natural lawyers took to be the arbitrariness of his theory of moral authority and obligation were some of many fundamental challenges found in Hobbes’s extraordinarily fertile and original arguments. A particularly important point of contention was his contractualist account of the familial duties in natural law, and thus his denial that they were natural in the sense of Grotius or his Scholastic predecessors. 

Many natural lawyers sought to reconstruct these duties as the core of natural law in a way that withstood Hobbes’s withering challenge. For example, Pufendorf’s arguments that the natural relations of the family held in the state of nature allowed him to rehabilitate paternal authority and the institutions on which it depended and also to argue for natural law as having authority prior to contract. Similarly, Cumberland’s focus on the promotion of the common good in his account of obligation, and benevolent paternalism, was a response to Hobbes. They and many others sought to counter what they took to be the arbitrariness with which Hobbes’s conventionalist and contractualist account was shot through. In fact one might argue that countering this arbitrariness was the main business of British moral philosophy up through Butler.

On the other hand, Hobbes was a central influence on those who read him, and particularly the thinkers who sought to refute or tame him. Hobbes’s Erastianism, contractarianism, absolutism, conventionalism about property, use of the state of nature to discover the character of natural law, and his stress on the minimal moral requirements of citizenship were modified by the next generations of philosophers. Continental authors such as Lambertus Van Velthuysen, Spinoza, and Leibniz were considerably more enthusiastic than their British counterparts. British authors such as Ralph Cudworth, Richard Cumberland, and Samuel Clarke criticised Hobbes’s moral philosophy for the assumptions in Leviathan (and elsewhere) concerning natural philosophy, knowledge, and metaphysics that they found wrong and which gave rise to determinism and an arbitrary and confused account of moral authority. But on the Continent, readers who focused on the De Cive often supplemented Hobbes with Cartesian epistemology and metaphysics. Velthuysen is particularly important in this regard insofar as he was both a major exponent of Descartes and the first major advocate of Hobbes. On his account God’s authority imposes the obligation to self-preservation on all of humankind and gives rise to contract and natural law. Pufendorf might be understood in contrast as developing a metaphysics of imposition which preserved the authority of obligation in opposition to Hobbes’s derivation of the fundamental law from self-preservation.