Taming the Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged to be the most important political philosopher to have written in English. Taming the Leviathan is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Hobbes’s political and religious ideas. In the first book-length treatment of the topic for over forty years, Jon Parkin follows the fate of Hobbes’s texts (particularly Leviathan) and the development of his controversial reputation during the seventeenth century, revealing the stakes in the critical discussion of the philosopher and his ideas. Revising the traditional view that Hobbes was simply rejected by his contemporaries, Parkin demonstrates that Hobbes’s work was too useful for them to ignore, but too radical to leave unchallenged. His texts therefore had to be controlled, their lessons absorbed and their author discredited. In other words the Leviathan had to be tamed. Taming the Leviathan significantly revises our understanding of the role of Hobbes and Hobbism in seventeenth-century England.

• The first major inter-disciplinary study of the impact of Leviathan for over 40 years • Covers every major, and most minor, seventeenth-century critic of Hobbes in England • Experienced and high-calibre author in area of heavyweight scholarly engagement

Introduction; 1. Reading Hobbes before Leviathan, 1640–1651; 2. Leviathan 1651–1654; 3. The storm 1654–1658; 4. Restoration 1658–1666; 5. Hobbes and Hobbism 1666-1675; 6. Hobbes and the Restoration Crisis 1675–1685; 7. Hobbism in the Glorious Revolution 1685–1700; Conclusion; Bibliography.