Thomas Hobbes Character Analysis in The Racial Contract

Hobbes was the 17th-century English philosopher who first accounted for the origins of society through a social contract in his 1651 book Leviathan. He famously argued that people live “nasty, brutish, and short” lives in the state of nature, which he imagined as a state of war. As a result, Hobbes argued that people would choose to submit to a ruler in order to avoid the state of war. While he contended that the state of nature was a hypothetical concept, he also claimed that “savage people” in the Americas were still living in it. Mills suggests that Hobbes only considered the state of nature hypothetical for white people, whom he thought of as rational because they voluntarily chose to form societies. Because Hobbes erroneously thought that non-white people didn’t live in organized societies, he believed that they were not rational enough to escape the state of nature. In turn, he thought that white people were justified in imposing society on non-white people.

Thomas Hobbes Character Timeline in The Racial Contract

The timeline below shows where the character Thomas Hobbes appears in The Racial Contract. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

...contract. Mills will next examine the key writings of the four major classic social contract theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant—to show that they openly wanted to reserve personhood, and therefore membership... (full context)

Thomas Hobbes famously argued that the state of nature is a constant state of war, in which... (full context)

Although Hobbes makes a clear moral and cognitive distinction between white and non-white people, he was controversial... (full context)

...how, despite all their important disagreements, influential male philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Rousseau all agreed that societies should subordinate women. Similarly, all the major philosophers of... (full context)