ABSTRACT
According to Aubrey’s Lives, Hobbes praised Aristotle’s discourse on animals. This essay identifies some fundamentals of this discourse – the centrality of sensation, the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, and the ultimate drive for self-preservation – as stimulating the new directions of Hobbes’s ideas on man and politics and reveals a different, and so far ignored, facet of the Aristotelian legacy. Particular attention is given to how Hobbes used Aristotle’s “social animals” to undermine the naturalness of the political.
