In this work, I explore some of the greatest and most important political philosophy ever written. I discuss masterpieces, but, as I shall show, these masterpieces appeared against a background of confusion. They were written in the seventeenth century, a conflicted, contested, multiply confused period. So, no doubt, were other centuries. However, in this case, the confusion brought forth masterpieces, and it is these masterpieces, in particular the great works of Hobbes and Locke, that I chiefly consider.

I take my title, Confusion's Masterpiece, from Shakespeare's Macbeth, a work that was written near the start of the century being examined. In Shakespeare's play, just after discovery of the murdered King Duncan, comes the following speech:

The speaker is Macduff, the good man in the play, and foil to its eponymous, villainous hero. Eventually he restores the moral order by killing the villain, the king's murderer. For Macduff, as he shows here by his speech, the murder of a king destroys the established and understood order embodied in the king. Hence for Macduff (and hence also for well-thinking, proper opinion), murder of a king is the ultimate damaging act against order. It is, as he puts it, the masterpiece of confusion. At this time in history, such order was generally taken to be established by God.