Thomas Hobbes on the Family and the State of Nature
Among the most celebrated passages in the literature of political philosophy is Thomas Hobbes' classic description of the incommodious, barren, and uncertain life in the state of nature: "no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Seventeenth-century critics, assuming that even the most rudimentary social unit, the family, was excluded from the Hobbesian state of nature, often opposed this view of "the NATURALL CONDITION of Mankind" with the patriarchally governed household and insisted that the natural "warre of every man against every man"1 never existed. The reaction of Bishop John Bramhall was typical: