Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 in fear—his mother, he said, was so frightened by the news of the Spanish Armada that she gave birth to twins, himself and fear—and he spent his career converting that fear into the most rigorous political philosophy the English language had produced. He survived the English Civil War, watched the structures of order dissolve, and concluded that both the human mind and the human commonwealth were mechanisms: assemblies of moving parts that could be understood, and therefore built, and therefore feared. In Leviathan (1651) he wrote that “when a man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total, from addition of parcels”—reason is reckoning, computation carried out on the names we attach to things. Three hundred years before anyone built a computer, Hobbes proposed that the mind is a calculating engine and that there is no