Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. Later he would say that fear and he were born twins, because his mother went into labor prematurely after hearing rumors of invasion. Whether or not this anecdote is literally true, it captures something about Hobbes’s temperament: a man haunted by the fragility of peace, attentive to the ways fear shapes politics. Hobbes’s father was a clergyman of modest means, prone to quarrels. After a fight outside his church, the elder Hobbes fled town, leaving his children in the care of their uncle. Young Thomas proved gifted at school and won a place at Oxford, where he studied the traditional curriculum of logic and scholastic philosophy. Yet he soon grew restless with Aristotelian abstractions and turned toward mathematics, mechanics, and the new sciences.

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