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Thomas Hobbes lived for ninety-one of the most eventful years in the history of England. Born in the year of England's defeat of the Spanish Armada, he fled to France during the civil war, fled back just before the Restoration, lived through the Great Fire of London and the plague (for both of which the House of Commons tried to hold him partly responsible on account of his supposed atheism), and died in the midst of the "Popish Plot." During many of these years he was contemplating, writing, publishing, or defending influential, sometimes decisive, works in mathematics, optics, aesthetics, history, rhetoric, psychology, and political philosophy. Indeed, he claimed in the "Epistle Dedicatory" to the Elements of Philosophy (1656), with typical confidence and vigor, to have founded the latter discipline: "Natural Philosophy is therefore but young; but Civil Philosophy yet much younger, as being no older (I say it provoked, and that my detractors may know how little they have wrought upon me) than my own book De Cive."
Even those who dispute that claim will admit that Leviathan (1651), the still-provocative work in which his ideas are spelled out in the most energetic detail, is one of the most important tracts ever written and one of the few masterpieces of political philosophy in the English language.
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