Thomas Hobbes is the most original and inflammatory Englishman ever to have written on political theory. His Leviathan (1651) was a spectre that haunted Restoration England. Quickly, the terms ‘Hobbist’, ‘Hobbian’, and ‘Hobbism’ entered the language. In many controversies – philosophical, political, theological, ethical, and scientific – it was incumbent upon authors to take a stand vis-à-vis Hobbes. That stand was most often hostile, for Hobbes was reviled as atheistic, immoral, and a friend of arbitrary power. Yet there is a deep paradox about the reception of Hobbes. He was a defender of absolute monarchy, yet many of his most stentorian critics were themselves Anglican Royalists. Indeed, for these intellectuals, to write against Hobbes came to be, alongside attacking popery and Puritanism, a badge of polemical prowess and public virtue, even a rite of passage towards preferment. For them, Hobbes built, as to civil government, the desired house, but upon disastrously mistaken metaphysical foundations. As to ecclesiastical government, he hatefully undermined churchmen and enslaved the church to the state. Consequently, the Anglican Royalist regime was unfavourable to Hobbes, who lived until 1679. His books were banned, and notoriously, as John Aubrey reports, ‘the bishops made a motion, to have the good old gentleman burned for a heretic’. Yet his person was protected by the king, and during the interval of the Cabal regime between 1667 and 1673 his authority served the ministry, albeit circumspectly. Those who found Hobbes's arguments persuasive had to express themselves indirectly or clandestinely. Consequently, documenting his positive reception presents a forensic puzzle. To the paradox and the puzzle must be added a hermeneutic morass: what Hobbes meant, or at least whom and what he intended to support, became (and remains) profoundly contested. Hobbes was appropriated by, and deprecated as the patron of, contradictory causes.

Hobbes's reception was European-wide. The focus of the present chapter is upon England, although it is appropriate to begin with Gottfried Leibniz, whose short essay ‘Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice’ (c. 1702) is worth reading not only for its commentary on Hobbes but also as a brilliant epitome of central dilemmas in the history of political thought from Plato onwards.

The polemic against Hobbes: the theological premises

The German philosopher Leibniz, the most persistent and percipient of Hobbes's continental critics, believed that the crux of the quarrel between them lay in Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma.