ABSTRACT
Death is central to the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. In this chapter, the author investigates the role that death plays in Hobbes’s political thought. Death first appears in the works of Hobbes within the context of his treatment of politics. Hobbes does offer a more purely scientific account of death, in his book De Homine, published in 1658, after the topic had already been treated in such political works as The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan. For Hobbes, the human desire to avoid death constitutes a “most certain postulate of human nature.” Hobbes has an extremely low opinion of priests, whom he blames for much of the civil strife that had overtaken Europe in his lifetime. Hobbes accuses clergymen of preying on the ignorance of their flocks by pretending that they have secret knowledge which will help in making appeals to God, whereas in reality they have only discovered a formula to increase their own worldly power.
