ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes belonged to a generation of Englishmen whose lives had been transformed, both for the better and (as he believed) for the worse, by the remarkable expansion in the English education system in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Underlying many of Hobbes’s most distinctive speculations about political life we can see reflections on the educational institutions that had made him, and that he believed had come close to destroying his country; his moral and political philosophy is in fact one of the most profound engagements with the facts of education which is to be found in the main body of western philosophy.
