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The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who spent his life as a tutor and companion to great noblemen, was a writer of genius with a greater power of phrase than any other English political philosopher. He was not, as he is sometimes misrepresented, a prophet of “bourgeois” individualism, advocating free competition in a capitalist free market. On the contrary, he was writing in a preindustrial, if increasingly commercial, society and did not much admire wealth as such but rather “honours.” He was socially conservative and eager to give a new philosophical sanction to a hierarchical, if businesslike, commonwealth in which ...(100 of 15732 words)