ulers like this who were successful.Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 and died in 1679. He lived through the Scientific Revolution as well as a political revolution. The English Civil war of the 1640’s influenced his political philosophy more than any other event. His most famous work, The Leviathan, was a written response to the English civil war, but also one of his attempts to unite the worlds of science and politics. Hobbes reasoned that human behavior functioned according to laws just as math and science. “He believed that he had created a scientific model of the political world that was as precise and accurate as Euclid’s system.” Hobbes, just like Machiavelli, thought he had the remedy to run a successful government.Hobbes’s remedy is known as the Leviathan. The Leviathan is an authoritarian government that could enforce the social contract by whatever means necessary. In this government, people collectively give up all rights except self – preservation, and the government shapes the will of the people into one. Hobbes rationalizes this conformity in that he believes individualism breeds anarchy and conformity breeds order. However, the possibility of actually conforming every individual’s will into one is unlikely. Hobbes sees man just as Machiavelli – evil, conniving, corrupt, and violent. He stated in the Leviathan: “…. that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war.” To an extent, I believe this is true. Man, n my opinion, is only interested in achieving his own success. What hurts him, he avoids; what helps him, he befriends. Hobbes, unlike Machiavelli, sees men as equal – equal in the capability of killing one another. He reasoned that because of this equality people would eventually come to the conclusion that they could prevent their demise by behaving toward one another in ...
