III. The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought

Abstract

The modern reputation of Hobbes's Leviathan as a work ‘incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory’ has concentrated so much attention on Hobbes's own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography that Hobbes's ‘extraordinary boldness’ set him completely ‘outside the main stream of English political thought’ in his time. The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbes's political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone ‘against all the powerful and still developing constitutionalist tradition’, but that the tradition (‘fortunately’) proved too strong for him. Hobbes was ‘the first to attack its fundamental assumptions’, but no one followed his lead. Although he ‘tried to sweep away the whole structure of traditional sanctions’, he succeeded only in provoking ‘the widespread re-assertion of accepted principles’, a re-assertion, in fact, of ‘the main English political tradition’. And the more Leviathan has become accepted as ‘the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece’ of English political theory, the less has Hobbes seemed to bear any meaningful relation to the ephemeral political quarrels of his contemporaries. The doctrine of Leviathan has come to be regarded as ‘an isolated phenomenon in English thought, without ancestry or posterity’. Hobbes's system, it is assumed, was related to its age only by the ‘intense opposition’ which its ‘boldness and originality’ were to provoke.