Thomas Hobbes

Born in 1588, Hobbes grew up after his father fled a brawl, raised instead by a wealthy uncle who sent him through Westport schools to Oxford and then Cambridge, where he graduated in 1608. He became tutor to the Cavendish family, a post that opened doors across Europe - he met Galileo, moved through intellectual salons, absorbed the new science. Returning to England in 1637, he watched the country slide into civil war, Parliamentarians against Royalists, nine years of slaughter that convinced him chaos was humanity's default setting. Leviathan emerged in 1651 as his answer: the social contract, the state of nature, the case for a sovereign strong enough to keep the peace. He wrote across geometry, optics, theology, and ethics - a polymath who drew accusations of atheism and fought bitter public feuds - but it was his cold-eyed diagnosis of power and human fear that stuck.