Hobbes, Thomas
[ (hobz) ]
A seventeenth-century British political philosopher; the author of Leviathan. According to Hobbes, human life in a “state of nature” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He argued that government must be strong, even repressive, to keep people from lapsing into a savage existence.
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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