ABSTRACT
Hobbes develops a surprisingly rich account of the nature, sources and varieties of human evil. This chapter explores this account, giving special attention to Hobbes's egoistic moral psychology, his famous conception of the origin and function of the commonwealth, and his caustic attack on the unholy alliance between scholastic philosophy and the Roman Church, a.k.a. the 'Kingdom of Darkness'. Hobbes's thoroughly kinetic and dynamic image of the human good – and correspondingly static and impotent conception of human evil – meshes nicely with Hobbes's physiology and physics, as one would expect from a thoroughgoing materialist. According to Hobbes's genealogy of religion, God is originally conceived as a king who rules and ordains either directly or by covenant with a mortal representative such Abraham or Moses. Hobbes's God is reminiscent of, and possibly inspired by, the god of the Stoics, which is also corporeal and thoroughly interspersed with ordinary bodies.
