Hobbes and Rousseau

So this is Thomas Hobbes, born in 1588. Well, Hobbes had a bit of a troubled childhood--a difficult father who was a clergyman, got into a fight with another clergyman and had to disappear. He had a fight actually in a cemetery, which in the sixteenth century was no-no, especially for a clergyman. Anyway, he grew up with uncles. Nevertheless, he got to the University of Oxford, did pretty good, and became a tutor of William Cavendish, and then traveled with him to Europe, France, and Italy, and he met Galileo and was greatly influenced by Galileo. At that time in English universities, they were mainly teaching Aristotle, and well Hobbes became very disenchanted with Aristotle, the dogmatism of Aristotle's philosophy, and he was enthralled by the emergence of new positive science, what Galileo represented.
Then he came back in England, and there were very turbulent politics; I will talk about this greater in the course. And he was among those, as a conservative guy--if you are Republican you will love it--he sided with the king against the parliament. And since he did that in 1640, he better skipped and went to France, into exile, and then returned in '51 to England. Because he was a troublemaker, he was not only in conflict with the Republicans, he was also in conflict with the Royalists. He died in 1679. Now his first work was a translation of Thucydides. He liked Thucydides because he thought Thucydides showed why democracy doesn't work. Right? He's an absolutist, Hobbes: a conservative, absolutist.
And then he wrote an interesting trilogy, and this again shows the unity of sciences and social sciences. The first volume deals with the human body, with biology. The second works on the individual; it is really psychology. And the last one works on society and politics. And he thinks the way how to understand human existence is start with bodily functions, and move from bodily functions to politics and philosophy. And then his major work is Leviathan. This is the...