Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity

This is the first full account of one of the most famous quarrels of the seventeenth century, that between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and the Anglican archbishop of Armagh, John Bramhall (1594–1663). This analytical narrative interprets that quarrel within its own immediate and complicated historical circumstances, the Civil Wars (1638–1649) and Interregnum (1649–1660). The personal clash of Hobbes and Bramhall is connected to the broader conflict, disorder, violence, dislocation and exile that characterised those periods. This monograph offers not only the first comprehensive narrative of their hostilities over two decades, but also an illuminating analysis of aspects of their private and public quarrel that have been neglected in previous biographical, historical and philosophical accounts, with special attention devoted to their dispute over political and religious authority. This will be essential reading for scholars of early modern British history, religious history and the history of ideas.

• The first comprehensive account of one of the most famous quarrels of the seventeenth century, that between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the Anglican archbishop of Armagh, John Bramhall • Offers an illuminating analysis of aspects of their private and public quarrel that have been neglected in previous biographical, historical and philosophical accounts • This will be essential reading for scholars of early modern British history, religious history and the history of ideas

Introduction; 1. Bishop Bramhall, the ‘Great Arminian’, ‘Irish Canterbury’ and ‘Most Unsound Man in Ireland’, 1633–1641; 2. Bishop Bramhall, the Earl of Newcastle, Thomas Hobbes and the first English Civil War; 3. Hobbes’s flight to France, De Cive and the beginning of the quarrel with Bramhall, summer 1645; 4. An epistolary skirmish, 1645–1646: Bramhall, ‘Discourse’, Hobbes, ‘Treatise’ and Bramhall, ‘Vindication’; 5. Bramhall and the Royalist schemes of 1646–1650; 6. Hobbes and Leviathan among the exiles, 1646–1651; 7. The public quarrel: Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity, 1654, Bramhall, Defence of True Liberty, 1655 and Hobbes, Questions concerning Necessity, Liberty and Chance, 1656; 8. Castigations of Hobbes’s Animadversions and The Catching of Leviathan, 1657–1658: Hobbes as Leviathan of Leviathans; 9. The restoration and death of Bramhall and Hobbes’s last word, 1668; Conclusion.