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Power and Authority in Seventeenth Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Richard Tuck
Richard Tuck
Affiliation:
Jesus College, Cambridge
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Extract

Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1974 , pp. 43 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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