Introduction

Abstract

This book is based on the Carlyle Lectures delivered at Oxford University in the Hilary Term 1991. The Carlyle Lectures were an attempt to characterise the relationship between the modern, liberal political theories of the seventeenth century — the theories which rested on the concept of natural rights — and the humanist political theories of the previous century. The study in this book has Thomas Hobbes as its central character. It was Hobbes above all who made clear the relationship between humanism and natural rights, and who demonstrated the link between the older jurisprudence of war and the new political theory. But for many historians of this subject, Hobbes has seemed to be anomalous — a critic of mainstream rights theories rather than their best exponent.