The University of Oxford condemned two books by Thomas Hobbes, De Cive and Leviathan, in July 1683, less than four years after his death, and ordered them burned as a danger to kings. The charge looks strange, because Leviathan (1651), the more famous of the two, argues that a ruler's power must be absolute. What offended was the reason Hobbes gave. The king's party held that kings rule by God's appointment. Hobbes said that government is something people make, out of fear of one another, and that they owe it obedience because nothing else keeps them alive.
A clergyman's son from Wiltshire, Hobbes spent most of his adult life as tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, the earls of Devonshire, and two encounters in those years prepared the argument. One was with Thucydides, the Greek historian of the war between Athens and Sparta. Hobbes published a translation in 1629, the first made into English directly from the Greek, and said later that the book showed how much wiser one man is than a crowd. The other was with geometry: John Aubrey, his friend and first biographer, reports that Hobbes was about forty when he opened a copy of Euclid at a theorem, refused to believe it, and followed the proof back step by step until he was convinced. The politics he went on to write is built the same way, from a few claims about human beings to conclusions that are meant to follow of necessity.
By 1640 Charles I and his parliament were disputing how far royal power reached, and both sides argued from precedent, law and Scripture. In May of that year Hobbes, aged fifty-two, finished The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, which argued from human nature instead. People are close enough to equal that the weakest can kill the strongest. Where no power stands over them all, each must protect himself, and life is short and without the comforts that only peace provides. Reason tells them to seek peace, but a promise is worth nothing without someone to enforce it. So they agree to hand the right of governing themselves to one man or one assembly. That sovereign cannot be limited, because whoever could enforce the limit would hold the real power. Nor can his power be divided: shared among several hands, it ends in disagreement, and disagreement is war. The treatise passed from hand to hand in manuscript, and when Parliament met again in November, Hobbes judged himself in danger and left for Paris, where he stayed eleven years.
There he restated the argument in Latin as De Cive (1642), taught mathematics to the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, and wrote Leviathan. The new book went further in two directions. About half of it concerns religion: the sovereign decides what doctrine is taught and how God is worshipped. It also ties obedience to protection, so that a government set up by a conqueror is as legitimate as an inherited one, and a subject whose life is threatened may resist. The exiled court suspected Hobbes of disloyalty and atheism and refused to receive him. At the end of 1651 he went home and submitted to the republic that had governed England since the execution of Charles I in 1649.
After the monarchy returned in 1660, Charles II gave him a pension but would not let him publish on politics or religion. In October 1666, weeks after the Great Fire of London, the House of Commons told a committee on atheism to gather information on Leviathan, and Hobbes, who was seventy-eight, burned some of his papers. He died at ninety-one in a Cavendish house.
His conclusion, that sovereign power must be unlimited, found few defenders, and later political philosophers mostly used it as the position to argue against. The method outlived it. Asking what free and equal people would agree to, with no appeal to God or custom, is now called social contract theory, and Leviathan is one of its earliest and most influential examples. Scholars still disagree about whether the religious half of the book was written in good faith, and about whether a subject's right to defend his own life undoes the sovereign's absolute power. Game theorists study his state of nature, the condition of people with no power over them, as a problem in which each person's rational choice leaves everyone worse off.