Intellectual setting
Hobbes lived through the English Civil War (1642-1651), tutored the future Charles II during his own exile in Paris, and wrote "Leviathan" partly as a response to the political and religious chaos of the period; his materialism and denial of incorporeal substance provoked charges of atheism, and the book was formally condemned and burned by Oxford University in 1683.
Key ideas
The state of nature and the social contract
Hobbes argued that without a common power to keep people "in awe," human life devolves into a war of every man against every man in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; rational, self-interested individuals therefore contract with one another to erect and obey an absolute sovereign who alone can guarantee peace.
Materialist psychology of the passions
Hobbes explained human motivation mechanistically, as appetites and aversions produced by matter in motion, grounding his politics in a naturalistic theory of human psychology and desire rather than in Aristotelian teleology or theological natural law.
Legacy
Hobbes's "Leviathan" became a foundational text of modern political philosophy, shaping the later contract theories of Locke and Rousseau and the modern study of sovereignty and the state; Hobbes is now regarded as the founder of the modern social-contract tradition and a central figure in debates about political authority and human nature.