My mother hearing of the Spanish Armada sailing up the English channel gave premature birth to me'. Hobbes said of himself that 'Fear and I were born twins. Hobbes was born in the Wiltshire town of Malmesbury where his father, Thomas senior, was a curate. Without that central authority things fall apart into anarchy or war, which destroys all possible civic life and prosperity. At the heart of his account is the idea of a social contract: a cement which binds together the atoms of society - individual persons - in a mutually advantageous agreement to accept a central authority, the function of which is to provide the conditions under which individuals may flourish. When Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, he set a model for the understanding of the nature, purpose and justification of government, according to principles which could for the first time be characterised as 'scientific'.
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