ABSTRACT
The fear that beset Hobbes was that which observant and thoughtful men might feel when they are compelled to notice how close to the surface of civilization lie anarchy, savagery, and chaos. Like Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli and Montaigne before him, and Nietzsche and Freud after him, Hobbes was a great psychologist whose knowledge is in the service of unmasking mankind, a master diagnostician of the various forms of the pathology of conscience. Hobbes’s nominalism has political as well as scientific motives. The reader of Hobbes may well be startled to find recurrent attacks on the great classical authors, including the very giants of antiquity, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca. Hobbes’s interest in the psychology of the passions, in the complex and numberless ways in which men rationalize their desires, dominated his interpretation of both the past and the present, of history and of politics.
