EUH 3204 Study aids

Test 1 and Test 2 will ask you to identify five out of six key terms (the key terms appear in a list at the beginning of every lecture outline). In your response, answer the following questions: who or what? where? when? why significant?  If you do not remember a precise date, provide a ballpark date (e.g. the mid seventeenth century).

sample ID: Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the key political theorists and writers of early modern Europe. He lived in England during the turbulent reigns of the early Stuarts (James I and Charles I), but "sat out" the War of the Three Kingdoms (aka the English Civil War) on the Continent. There he tutored the future king Charles II. He published his most influential work, Leviathan, in 1651. Hobbes is significant for providing a theoretical justification for absolutism. According to Hobbes, life in a state of nature was "nasty, brutish, and short." Driven by self-interest and greed, people constantly compete with one another for power and wealth. To prevent anarchy, subjects enter into a social contract with their ruler, who rules with absolute authority. By making his case in reference to nature and not religion, Hobbes departed from other theorists (such as Bossuet and Domat) who justified absolutism on the basis of the divine right of kings.


Time lines

Dynastic table  

Wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

France under the early Bourbons

Austria and the Ottoman Empire




Europe, 1715