Hobb·ism

(hŏb′ĭz′əm)

A political theory promulgated by Thomas Hobbes, advocating absolute monarchy as the means of guaranteeing a stable civil society.

Hobb′ist adj. & n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Hobbism

(ˈhɒbɪzəm)

(Philosophy) the mechanistic political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which stresses the necessity for a powerful sovereign to control human beings

ˈHobbist n

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

Hob•bism

(ˈhɒb ɪz əm)

n.

the doctrines of Hobbes, esp. the doctrine of submission to a royal sovereign to avoid disorder resulting from conflicting individual interests.

[1675–85; Hobb (es) + -ism]

Hob′bist, n., adj.

Hobbism

the philosophical beliefs of Thomas Hobbes, who maintained that an individual has the right to self-preservation and the pursuit of happiness. — Hobbist, n. — Hobbesian, adj.

See also: Philosophy

Mentioned in

philosophy

References in periodicals archive

After a concise survey of "subversive ideologies" circulated through coffee-house debates--including, most famously, "Hobbism [which] was also branded a 'coffee-house philosophy'" --Shapin and Schaffer note that such places and the debates they spawned through their open forums for discussion proved so potentially disruptive that "In the terrible year of 1666, Clarendon contemplated suppressing such meeting-places.

Publicizing the Science of God: Milton's Raphael and the boundaries of knowledge

This misunderstanding was most clearly formed in the public mind by the scandals and controversy that centered on the Scarsgill affair, which involved a Cambridge Hobbist who was forced to publically recant his Hobbism, calling the philosophy "the Accursed Atheism of this age." (14) From this point in the late 1660s on, atheism, libertinism, and immorality--positions not directly argued for in Leviathan, but always suspected by his opponents to be supported by his philosophy--became intimately associated with Hobbes because the public now had a real sordid Hobbist to hang all their suspicions upon.

The country wife, Dance of the Cuckolds

Martinich points out how divergent such assumptions are from reality: "Because Hobbes's actual views are so different from the views attributed to him, we need to distinguish between Hobbes's actual views and Hobbism, the distorted set of doctrines that were attributed to him from at least the Restoration onwards" (43).

Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs, eds.: The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought

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