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In Our Time
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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BIOGRAPHY
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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THOMAS HOBBES
Read audience comments on this edition.
Find out more about this subject by using our research page.
"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man". Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth century philosopher, was principally interested in political philosophy.
For Hobbes, the difference between order and disorder was stark. In the state of nature, ungoverned man lived life in "continual fear, and danger of violent death". The only way out of this "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" existence, he said, was to relinquish all your freedom and submit yourself to one all powerful absolute sovereign. Hobbes's proposal, contained in his controversial, and now classic text, Leviathan, was written just as England was readjusting to life after the Civil War and the rule of Oliver Cromwell.
But how did the son of a poor clergyman end up as the most radical thinker of his day? Why did so many of Hobbes' ideas run counter to the prevailing fondness for constitutionalism with a limited monarchy? And why is he regarded by so many political philosophers as an important theorist when so few find his ideas convincing?
Contributors
Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge
David Wootton, Professor of History at the University of York
Annabel Brett, Senior Lecturer in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge University
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RELATED LINKS
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