Definition of "Hobbes"

A surname originating as a patronymic.

1. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), English philosopher.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • Masters and men, according to Mr. Thornton, fatally confront each other in something like Hobbes’s misanthropically imagined state of nature, with nothing but force, or the fear of force in the background […]

     1871, “Economic Fallacies and Labour Utopias”, in The Quarterly Review, volume 131, number 261, page 244

   • The ideological gap between figures like Boehner and antagonists like Ted Cruz is not completely nonexistent; a world in which Boehner had unfettered power would have a radically smaller government, while a Cruz-topia would look more like Hobbes’s state of nature.

     2015 October 9, Jonathan Chait, “Why Republicans Need Paul Ryan As House Speaker”, in New York‎

   • […] Wengrow and Graeber argue that the life of hunter-gatherers before widespread farming was nothing like “the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory,” which hold that early humans lived in small bands in which they acted almost entirely on instinct, either brutish (as in Hobbes) or egalitarian and innocent (as in Rousseau).

     2022 July 11, Virginia Hefferman, “Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans”, in Wired‎