Thomas Hobbes: The most annoying philosopher of all time?

Our series moves on from the Renaissance and into the 17th century, starting with Thomas Hobbes who found a way to annoy almost everybody

Hobbes has been called, with some justice, the father of modern analytic philosophy, and he certainly ushered in modern political philosophy and social theory as we know it (National Portrait Gallery)

It is difficult to have anything but a great deal of admiration for someone who managed to annoy as diverse a group of people as did Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).

Parliamentarians were annoyed by his claim that the king’s right to rule is absolute, and monarchists by his suggestion that the root of this power is not divine but granted by the people. Hobbes annoyed mathematicians by insisting in the face of overwhelming criticism that he had squared the circle. He annoyed Descartes by offering profound objections to his views shortly before the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy. He annoyed at least one bishop with his position on free will and conducted a lifelong public and sometimes acrimonious debate with him on the subject. He annoyed the Church by arguing, among other things, that the king is in charge of the interpretation of scripture and atheists by taking the sacrament when he mistakenly thought he was about to die.

Proof that a lecturer had indulged in “Hobbism”, a byword for atheism, was grounds for dismissal during Hobbes’s lifetime. The possibility that Hobbes had annoyed even God was, for a time, seriously entertained. Following the Great Fire and the Great Plague, parliament wondered whether Hobbes’s writings had provoked God’s retribution and were somehow responsible for London’s disasters. A committee was set up which eventually demanded that Hobbes stop publishing.