Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first great English political philosopher, and his book Leviathan was one of the first truly modern works of philosophy. He has long had the reputation of being a pessimistic atheist, who saw human nature as inevitably evil, and proposed a totalitarian state to subdue human failings. In this study, Richard Tuck shows that while Hobbes may indeed have been an atheist, he was far from pessimistic about human nature, nor did he advocate totalitarianism. By locating him against the context of his age, Dr. Tuck reveals Hobbes to have been passionately concerned with the refutation of scepticism in both sciences and ethics, and to have developed a theory of knowledge which rivalled that of Descartes in its importance for the formation of modern philosophy.
About the Author
Richard Tuck is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Natural Rights Theories (1979) and Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (1993), and has produced editions of Hobbes's Leviathan and (with Michael Silverthorne) De Cive.
