During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.

Considering the increasing privatization of public schools in the United States, the authors of this chapter utilize contractarianism to critique neoliberal practices. Textual evidence is drawn on to show the influence of contractarian arguments on neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. After an explanation of the contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the authors show that the neoliberal versions of the social contract are both incompatible with the tradition writ large and internally inconsistent philosophically. Rather than a public characterized by privatization, and the undermining of public schools that results, the authors argue for a public in which responsibility, obligation, and freedom are not contradictory terms, and a vision of public schools in which teachers successfully bring about those ethical goals.

This chapter examines the view that state creation requires the existence of a normatively legitimate government. It begins by defining governmental legitimacy, arguing that it is best analysed in terms of the moral justifiability of individual acts of governance, whether viewed individually or in aggregate. Next, it considers what it means for institutions, social conventions, and legal principles to be legitimate before moving on to consider the negative argument that no theory of state creation that excludes a criterion of governmental legitimacy could ever be morally plausible. Having dismissed this objection as mistaken, the chapter then examines a range of legitimacy-based reconstructions, which draw respectively upon the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke. Each position is critiqued and dismissed as an implausible approach to the law of state creation.

Hobbes condemns liberty of conscience by stressing its incendiary repercussions on social stability and political sovereignty. Religious dissenters fashion themselves as sovereigns, emboldening them to do whatever they want rather than obey the state. For Hobbes, invocations to conscience are mere assertions of opinion – deeply held and felt, such that individuals insist on acting in accordance with them, but opinions nonetheless. While Hobbes anticipates the danger of liberty of conscience, he also offers a potential solution to this very problem – civic education – and invites us to reflect on how we might cultivate consensus through attempts to shape the conscience of dissenters. The possibility of peaceful co-existence becomes, at some point, about the project of persuasion, for Hobbes, such that invocations of conscience will abate over time and the threat of liberty of conscience to political authority may be tamed.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

Thomas Hobbes’ affinity for certain core conceptions of liberalism has been noted by critics and admirers alike. Nonetheless, these proto-liberal aspects have tended to be overshadowed by his more obvious institutional support for absolute monarchy. This tension has sparked generations of disagreement. While building on familiar scholarly debates, the chapter sheds light on three less explored Hobbesian conceptual revolutions. The first is Hobbes’ distinction between persons and individuals. The ascendancy of the individual at the expense of the personage gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among such individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on an ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. Finally, the Hobbesian theory model of solidarity is distinguished by its aspiration to uniformity. What Hobbes castigates as asperity on the part of individual subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of discrepant wills challenges uniformity, but also because such persons are representative of differences.

John Robertson explores the terms in which Spinoza adapted sacred history, as recorded in the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament, to support his political thinking in the Theological–Political Treatise (1670). Rather than reading this work in the light of Spinoza’s philosophy, the focus of most scholarship, Robertson argues that Spinoza sought to understand sacred history on its own terms, as constituted by the three ‘constants’ of revealed religion: prophecy, a sacred text, and the ‘Word of God’ contained within the text. Spinoza’s understanding of these concepts is shown to have shaped the lessons which he proceeded to draw from the history of the Hebrews, their religious customs and their commonwealth. Spinoza’s approach to sacred history is then compared with that of Hobbes, drawing out both similarities and differences. A final section asks what became of this interest in sacred history as a source for political thinking in the Enlightenment, suggesting that its repudiation by some (such as Rousseau) was offset by a shift in the interest of others (such as Vico) from the Hebrews to the gentiles.

Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

When did the emotions become political? It would be natural to view a formal political analysis of emotions as a classical phenomenon that was reprised under new and more decisive terms in late humanism and reimagined in the eighteenth century. In such a history we would expect to encounter the work of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. It would also be natural to take Hobbes and Vico at their word and read this recovery of the political dimension of emotion as a rejection of medieval philosophy. I will propose the opposite: the grounds for this political turn were laid in late medieval scholasticism. The precedent for humanist and Enlightenment-era political thought about emotion lies with a repudiated scholasticism and its reinvention of classical Greek thought. It is the history of rhetoric that reveals this turn to the political. The thread that links these transformations together is the political reception and re-absorption of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the modern assimilation of the Rhetoric began in earnest with the most influential statecraft treatise of the Middle Ages, De regimine principum, written about 1277 by the scholastic theologian Giles of Rome.

The scepticism of the period from roughly 1645 to 1680 prompted philosophers’ attempts to rethink theology and moral and civil philosophy in their search for ideas concerning the common and the public good. Ralph Cudworth’s effort to overcome the challenges posed by fragmentation in religion and politics and to develop a philosophy helpful in uniting society, but not at the expense of liberty, demonstrate that Neoplatonism was an important force during that period. In a sceptical era, John Selden contributed to particularism in natural law. A discussion of Sir Robert Filmer’s life and key political ideas together with the principles of political economy he espoused follows. Given the disintegration of moral theology in that period, the commercialization of societal ties seems to have been unstoppable. Against the Macphersonian critique of possessive individualism, the chapter puts forward the opening argument that both Hobbes and Locke sought to tame the harsh society characterized by the use of credit they saw before them and that they chose to do so by means of political philosophy and natural law.

“Faith: Impersonating Faith, or How We Came to Have Faith in Fictions” analyzes how faith was taken up by Reformation theologians, by political theorist Thomas Hobbes, and by Aphra Behn in her earliest prose fiction. The chapter takes up “faith” at a key point in its history, in order to account for what it meant before secularization and for what its role would be in a secular epistemology, politics, and culture. It analyzes Thomas Hobbes and Aphra Behn in order to see how they link the idea of faith to the emergent category of fiction: In Hobbes, the political project of contract relies on fictionality for its form, while in Behn, the fictional project of the nascent novel relies on faith for its form.

Chapter 3 revisits the republicanism of the free state. Historians have disagreed about the extent and nature of republican thinking during the free state. Some historians have attached little importance to republicanism, claiming that it was inconspicuous, that ‘republican ideology played only a minor role’ and that it only properly emerged after the free state. Other historians have challenged such arguments and have accentuated the republican arguments in favour of the free state. Taking its cue from such historians, the chapter demonstrates that republican defences of the free state were loud and clear from the beginning of 1649 until 1652. It was repeatedly argued that only a free state could guarantee liberty. The chapter also points out the seriousness with which many royalists, Presbyterians and other enemies of the free state took its republicanism. They questioned every aspect of republicanism; for them, a free state was a disastrous form of state and, more importantly, the idea that it safeguarded liberty was a hollow sham.

In Chapter 8 I explore key moments of the reception of Plutarch in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. I look at key aspects of the resonance of Plutarch in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). I also discuss the significance of Philemon Holland’s (1552–1637) translation of Plutarch’s essay “How to Profit from your Enemies.” I show how this essay (which Hobbes read in the original Greek and Latin translations but also consulted in Holland’s version) can shed new light on Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).

This introductory chapter outlines the problem of social order and the main argument of the book: that the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together has become – and has remained – a philosophical puzzle in modern political science, a presupposition that has been built into our concepts, theories, and normative commitments. Having outlined the argument, the contents and the structure of the book, the chapter then provides a short background for the problem of social order in political science. The chapter recalls how this problem emerged as such in modern social and political discourse in the evolution of the modern concepts of state, nation, and society and discusses how the relations among these concepts provided nineteenth-century political thought with a solution to the problem of social order predicated on a fusion of nationality and statehood.

This chapter examines the double vision of hope, sacred and profane, epitomized in English literature by the jointly authored poem, “On Hope,” in which Cowley’s satire on worldly wishes is interlaced with Richard Crashaw’s encomium on religious hope. Yet religious hope is de-centered in the Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Milton, in Paradise Lost, shies away from hope as a theological virtue, seeing it tied to ambition and original sin. Hobbes, focused on things seen rather than unseen, treats worldly hope as a necessary part of human motivation and the reason, along with fear, for the strictures of civil authority. Hobbes’s naturalism tinges subsequent Christian writers, including Addison, Pope, and Johnson, who alternately satirize worldly hopes and treat them as inevitable and consolatory. In the French Revolutionary era there arises a new, properly political hope, aimed at alleviating or eliminating the structural conditions of poverty via democratic-representative activity. Hope as an anodyne for poverty, and for slavery, is questioned by laborer poets and the former slave and anti-slavery polemicist, Olaudah Equiano.

In the Scientific Revolution the concept of body evolved along several divergent lines, from conceptions that rely exclusively on extension and motion to more elaborate accounts that include attributes such as solidity and force. A host of complications were disputed, such as atomism versus the infinite divisibility of bodies, the distinction between primary and secondary properties, and the possibility of a vacuum. This chapter explores these and other issues, but with an emphasis on the relationship between body and spatial extension. Descartes's three-part distinction—i.e., whether the relationship between body and extension is conceptually, modally, or really distinct—serves as a framework for investigating the development of early modern theories of material body, a process that laid the basis for the ontology and epistemology of modern science.

This chapter concerns the early modern redefinition of psychology as the science of mind. It examines the way the “invention of mind” was incorporated into Descartes’s metaphysical project. This Cartesian innovation marked a rupture from the traditional science of the soul as a division of natural science or physics. Rejecting the Aristotelian partition of the soul into distinct powers and the Scholastic view of the principle of thought (the intellect) as only the highest psychic power, the new Cartesian psychology required the unity of the soul as the thinking substance. What constituted early modern psychology as a metaphysical science of mind, this chapter argues, was fundamentally Descartes’s “realist” thesis that mind is a thing (res). Together with this Cartesian substantialist view, its critical reception structured the modern science of mind. The early modern alternatives to Descartes’s ontological thesis about mind, the chapter highlights, were based either on the argument that mind is not a thing or on the argument that mind is a non-substantial thing, a mere mode. The chapter illustrates the first argument with Hobbes, the second with Regius and Spinoza.