Hobbes and the Wolf-Man

Abstract

A few years ago when I was living in Spain, I depended in part on the London Times Literary Supplement to keep me abreast of developments in the English speaking literary and intellectual worlds. On unfolding the latest issue one morning, I was greeted by a bold-face headline proclaiming ‘The Hobbesian world of the Amazonian Jungle’. The headline writer had, of course, hit on a nearly infallible way of communicating with his educated readers. They would know Hobbes’s name and if they remembered anything at all about him from their school days, it would be that he held men to be vicious, wolflike creatures who preyed without stop or relent against one another. And so Hobbes’s name could be depended on to inform the readers of the supplement that if they read the trailing article, they would be treated to juicy tales of savage atrocities, in this case among the steamy vines and ferns of Brazil. Such has been the fate of Thomas Hobbes. This timid, scholarly man who detested war, and who expended his best energies in trying to persuade his contemporaries to cooperation, accommodation and peace, had come in the 20th century to be a symbol for all that is worst in human nature. Branded the Monster of Malmsbury in his own lifetime, he is remembered three hundred years later as the great maligner of human nature.