WHEN it comes to PR, the great political philosopher Thomas Hobbes has had one long stretch of bad luck. When his magnificent Leviathan appeared in 1651 he was derided as the “monster of Malmesbury,” an allegedly godless man who posed a deep and abiding threat to the established order. And indeed he did, whether godless or not.
His fortunes never really improved in the reputation stakes. In his essay on John Bramhall, Hobbes’s most persistent contemporary critic, T. S. Eliot, was snidely dismissive: “Thomas Hobbes was one of those extraordinary little upstarts whom the chaotic motions of the Renaissance tossed into eminence which they hardly deserved and have never lost.” Most recently, in the great conservative debate over the nature and future of the American “regime,” Hobbes is seen to hover in the nihilistic shadows of modern liberalism like some misbegotten witch ready to crash a christening.
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