ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes’s entire political philosophy was a meditation upon the political convulsions that took place in England between 1640 and 1660, the English civil war. Hobbes’s response to those convulsions was a theory of the state which guaranteed order above everything else. In Behemoth Hobbes traces the origin of the English civil war to what may at first seem an unlikely event: the schism between pope and emperor generally known as the investiture conflict dating back to the eleventh century. Hobbes’ depiction of the nature of man, then, involves considering him removed from the force, society, which gives an artificial dimension to his character. Further, for Hobbes, humans in the state of civil war reveal what they are like when unconstrained by a central authority. Hobbes’ theory of the state makes sense in the chaos of civil war. Hobbes is writing prior to the complete emergence of liberalism.
