Materialists
Key Idea
“Life without sovereign authority is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Overview & Origins
Hobbes reduced everything to matter in motion, including thought. The mind is computation; the state is an artificial body; human beings without governance return to a war of all against all. His Leviathan is one of the most frightening and honest books in political philosophy. It was suppressed in his lifetime and has shaped every serious theory of the state since.
Emerging in the late 16th and 17th centuries, the Materialist school, epitomized by Thomas Hobbes, sought to ground all phenomena in the mechanics of matter and motion. Hobbes’ philosophical inquiry was driven by a profound skepticism toward abstract metaphysics, instead focusing on the tangible and observable. In his seminal work, *Leviathan*, he argued that human thought itself is a computational process, reducible to physical interactions. This mechanistic view extended to his political philosophy, where he posited that the state is an artificial construct, a 'Leviathan,' necessary to prevent the chaos of human nature. Without a sovereign authority, Hobbes famously declared, life would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' His stark realism, though controversial, laid the foundation for modern political theory, influencing thinkers from Locke to Rousseau. Hobbes’ Materialism remains a cornerstone of philosophical discourse, challenging idealist traditions and emphasizing the primacy of the physical world.
Core Tenets
Mechanistic Materialism
All phenomena, including thought, are reducible to matter in motion.
The Artificial State
The state is a constructed entity designed to impose order on inherently chaotic human nature.
State of Nature
Without governance, human existence devolves into a perpetual war of all against all.
Philosophers of this Tradition
Canonical Works
The masterwork of political philosophy. Hobbes argues that without a sovereign power, human life would be a war of all against all. The social contract is born from fear.
Cavendish's critique of the new mechanical and microscope-driven science, paired with her own vitalist alternative: that matter is everywhere alive, self-moving, and knowing, and that nature is a single rational body. It was published with her utopian fiction The Blazing World, an early masterpiece of imagined worlds.
Core Ideas & Concepts
Centers of Thought
Voices & Maxims
“The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
“Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.”
“There is no part of nature that is not alive, and that does not have sense and reason.”