Hobbes

American  

[hobz] / hɒbz /

noun

1. Thomas, 1588–1679, English philosopher and author.

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Hobbes British  

/ hɒbz /

noun

1. Thomas. 1588–1679, English political philosopher. His greatest work is the Leviathan (1651), which contains his defence of absolute sovereignty

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Other Word Forms

• Hobbesian noun

Example Sentences

Mr. Waterfield inclines toward Hobbes’s “they that have odds of power exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can get.”

From The Wall Street Journal

On that distant, sunny summer afternoon, Mr. Hobbes had already been dead for nearly a century.

From Literature

Some historians find its origins in the secular individualism of the 18th-century Enlightenment, or in the earlier political thought of John Locke or Thomas Hobbes.

From The Wall Street Journal

The founders of these micronations — in the 2000s quite a few dot-com tycoons — were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes.

From Los Angeles Times

In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes pegged laughter as the companion of scorn.

From Salon