Episode Details

In April 1588, panic over the approaching Spanish Armada sent a pregnant woman in Westport into premature labor, and Thomas Hobbes later said his mother gave birth to twins: himself and fear. This episode traces how a boy abandoned by a brawling, anti-intellectual clergyman father and bankrolled by a glove-manufacturing uncle became a prodigy translating Greek tragedies, rejected Aristotle's teleology at Oxford, and landed the tutoring job with the Cavendish family that gave him decades of protection, income, and access to Europe's scientific revolution, including work with Francis Bacon and a 1636 visit to Galileo under house arrest.

We then explain Hobbes's philosophy of matter in motion, his view of humans as biological machines driven by appetite and aversion, and the determinism that horrified his contemporaries. Watching the English Civil War from exile in Paris, he wrote Leviathan in 1651, describing the state of nature as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and arguing that frightened people rationally surrender their rights to an absolute sovereign who holds a monopoly on violence. We cover why the book alienated royalists and French Catholics alike, his pragmatic submission to the revolutionary government, the 1666 heresy bill that led him to burn his papers, his feuds with Bishop Bramhall and mathematician John Wallis over squaring the circle, and his translation of Homer in his late eighties before his death at 91.

• How the Cavendish family functioned as a 17th-century incubator for Hobbes's genius
• Why love and hate are just physical pushes and pulls in Hobbes's mechanical psychology
• The mafia protection racket analogy for the social contract and the sovereign
• How Hobbes replaced divine right with consent from the ground up
• Why his materialism led to accusations of atheism and claims that God must be physical