This volume is designed to offer the most direct access possible to the argument and sources of a classic of English political and religious thought which has recently become a subject of critical controversy. There are difficulties. Hooker's sentences are long and his chapter-length paragraphs very long. His sources, tersely cited as a rule, are unfamiliar. The solutions to these problems chosen by the great nineteenth-century editor of his works, John Keble, were to segment Hooker's text – by heavy punctuation of sentences and the division of chapters into numbered sections – and vastly augment his notes. These measures had their point, but they are sometimes intrusive. In this edition, spelling has been modernized, but Hooker's punctuation and paragraph indivisions have been left alone for the Preface and Book I (which were published in his lifetime), and only a few changes have been made in the posthumously published Book VIII (the surviving manuscripts of which have paragraph divisions, one indication among others that our version of the book is not a finished one). The lack of paragraphs in the earlier parts of the work may seem a hardship at first, but if the reader will think of immersion rather than quick processing as the right approach to Hooker's prose, the result will be rewarding.

Richard Hooker was born in or near Exeter in April 1554, less than six years before the accession of Elizabeth I and the reestablishment by statute of the religious and political order for which he himself was to attempt a coherent intellectual justification some forty years later. At an early age he came to the attention of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, the first official defender of the English church in Elizabeth's reign. With Jewel's support, Hooker attended Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in 1579 and taught logic and Hebrew.

Hooker was made a deacon in 1579 and later ordained to the priesthood. In 1585 his appointment as Master of the Temple made him chief pastor of one of the principal centers of legal studies in London. Enough sermons survive from this period of his life to form the basis for a substantial volume in the Folger edition. However, Hooker's chief work – indeed, the chief English prose work of the sixteenth century – was Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Eight Books.

Hooker gave up his place at the Temple to work on the Laws in 1591 and resided for the next few years in the home of his father-inlaw, the London merchant John Churchman. He consulted frequently in the course of writing with two of his former students, Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a member of the parliament of 1593, and George Cranmer, grand-nephew of the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury.

FILMER, LOCKE AND HOBBES. ‘TWO TREATISES’ AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL WRITING

If Locke wrote his book as a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer, then he cannot have written it as a refutation of Thomas Hobbes. It is almost as mistaken to suppose that he was arguing deliberately against Leviathan as to believe that he wrote to rationalize the Revolution. There would have been no point whatsoever for the intellectual champion of the Whig exclusionists to produce one more criticism of Hobbes. Professor Skinner has demonstrated that Hobbes did have an intellectual context and a following: he did not spring from nowhere and exist without effect, excepton his opponents. But he was politically the least important of all the absolutist writers. Filmer, on the other hand, was the man of the moment, a formidable and growing force with those whose political opinions mattered, and representing in himself the ipsissima verba of the established order. Therefore Locke found himself impelled to write on this subject, and for that reason Filmer's thinking lies directly behind his political doctrines. Moreover, his controversy with patriarchalism has a fundamental significance in the history of political and social thinking, for the development of the structure of modern society.

Locke rejected Hobbesian absolutism along with Filmer's, of course: the word ‘Leviathan’ occurs in his Second Treatise, and there are phrases and whole arguments which recall the Hobbesian position, and must have been intended in some sense as comments upon them.

In a letter to the Jesuit Father des Bosses, Leibniz had occasion to complain that ‘two things usually make publishers hesitate – one is their desire to profit; the other is ignorance. Thus they do not know what they should select. They do not trust scholars enough, because they believe that scholars have a better understanding of what is scholarly than of what will sell.’ If Leibniz were alive today, he would be gratified to know that the Cambridge University Press, in consenting to publish an edition of his political writings, showed itself admirably free of all these faults. From the outset the Press trusted my judgment in the selection and translation of the pieces to appear in this volume, but also saw to it that I was provided with a searching critique of some of the more obscure points in the ‘editor's introduction’. For this trust, for this willingness to revive interesting and unaccountably neglected political writings of a great contemporary of Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke, I am much in their debt. While it is true that no one can pretend that Leibniz' political writings are equal to those of such contemporaries, or even to his own writings on logic, metaphysics and theology, they are at least intriguing and worthy of some attention.

Anyone who reads the introduction will notice that it draws on a wide range of books, letters, manuscripts etc., and that Leibniz' ‘political system’ has been assembled out of these materials.

This short work, which is undated, is somewhat surprising in the use Leibniz makes of the Golden Rule, which he turns into a prudential political maxim. (The present translation omits a few passages which refer to writers who are no longer read at all; the original text is to be found in vol. II of Grua's Textes Inédits.)

The place of others is the true point of perspective in politics as well as in morality. And the precept of Jesus Christ to put oneself in another's place serves not only the object of which our Lord spoke, that is to say morality, in order to know our duties toward our neighbor, but also in politics, in order to know the intentions which our neighbor may have against us. One will never understand these [intentions] better than by putting himself in his place, or when one imagines oneself councilor and minister of state of an enemy or suspect prince. One thinks then what he could think or undertake, and what one could advise him to do. This fiction excites our thoughts, and has served me more than once in properly divining what was to be done. It may be, in truth, that one's neighbor is neither so malintentioned, nor so clear-sighted as I make him out; but the surest thing is to imagine things at their worst in politics, that is when it is a question of being careful and of being defensive, just as it is necessary to imagine [things] at their best in morality, when it is a question of harming and offending others.

‘Property I have nowhere found more clearly explained, than in a book entitled, Two Treatises of Government.’ This remark was made by John Locke in 1703, not much more than a year before he died. It must be a rare thing for an author to recommend one of his own works as a guide to a young gentleman anxious to acquire ‘an insight into the constitution of the government, and real interest of his country’. It must be even rarer for a man who was prepared to do this, to range his own book alongside Aristotle's Politics and Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, to write as if the work were written by somebody else, somebody whom he did not know. Perhaps it is unique in a private letter to a relative. What could possibly be the point of concealing this thing, from a man who probably knew it already?

Odd as it is, this statement of Locke anticipates the judgement of posterity. It was not long before it was universally recognized that Locke on Government did belong in the same class as Aristotle's Politics, and we still think of it as a book about property, in recent years especially. It has been printed over a hundred times since the 1st edition appeared with the date 1690 on the title-page. It has been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese and Hindi: probably into other languages too.

Leibniz' commentary on William Sherlock's The Case of the Allegiance Due to Soveraign Powers – which is published here through the generous permission of the Leibniz-Archiv at the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek in Hanover – does not revolutionize one's view of his political philosophy; but it does provide us with a ‘new’ and wholly characteristic political letter which has the merit of helping to complete his most important correspondence dealing with theoretical and practical politics, the Briefwechsel with the Scottish nobleman Thomas Burnett. This exchange of letters, which extended from 1695 to 1713; contains some of Leibniz' most significant political passages, including one that has no parallel anywhere in his writings: ‘The end of political science with regard to the doctrine of forms of commonwealths, must be to make the empire of reason flourish … Arbitrary power is what is directly opposed to the empire of reason… Thus one must think in this world of laws which can serve to restrain not only kings, but also the deputies of the people, and judges.’ The letters to Burnett also contain characteristic observations on Hobbes, Locke, Harrington, Grotius, Plato and Aristotle, as well as good popular statements of Leibniz' theodicy and monadology. And in a writer like Leibniz, who put some of his principal thoughts into an endless flow of letters with hundreds of correspondents, a ‘new’ letter means more than it might in many cases.