This Introduction offers a brief review of the central arguments and issues that arise in Hume’s Dialogues. It considers why Hume used the dialogue format to present his views and it also considers how the content of the Dialogues relates to Hume’s other philosophical works and his historical context. It concludes with a brief summary of the various contributions and an account of the way that the collection is structured and organized.

This chapter frames the debate between those who think that Kant’s philosophy of Right is in some way independent from his moral philosophy and those who do not in two ways. First, the chapter argues that Kant recognizes only two forms of practical reason, namely the pure practical reason of morality and the empirical practical reason of prudential self-love, and that if his philosophy of Right is not to be a version of Hobbesian prudence, it can only be a part of morality – namely, the coercively enforceable part. It argues further that the moral foundation of Kant’s philosophy of Right is the innate right to freedom, itself the correlative of our obligation always to treat humanity as an end and never merely as a means, since humanity is equivalent to the ability of each to set his or her own ends, that is, freedom. In the second part of the chapter, it is argued that the duties of individuals and rulers alike to both institute and maintain the civil condition, namely the state, make sense only as moral and indeed ethical duties, although not duties of virtue to promote self-perfection and the happiness of others.

This essay examines first the understanding of sex equality by the philosophic forebears of the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes was the more thoroughgoing egalitarian of the two. He insisted that men were not inherently superior to women, either in strength or prudence. Locke by contrast wrote that in the conjugal union, even in nature, while the union by mutual compact could be limited to whatever was needed for raising children, still, because of the need to have some authority stronger and more able, men were entitled to rule the household. Despite this public claim that men are the “abler” sex, Locke’s private writings showed him to be much more gender egalitarian than Jefferson himself.

This chapter surveys associationist theories of emotion leading up to Darwin’s Expression. These theories analyze emotions as sequences of thoughts, feelings, and actions, linked together by principles of association. Thomas Hobbes contributes to this tradition the idea that emotions can be analyzed as “trains of thoughts.” John Locke contributes the idea that these trains are connected by the “association of ideas.” David Hume contributes the idea that association can occur via contiguity, resemblance, or cause and effect. David Hartley puts these ideas together to present the first full-fledged associationist theory of mind and emotion. Harley’s ideas are developed further by Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), Thomas Brown, James Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, among others. This tradition in the philosophy of emotion has never before been described or analyzed.

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.

During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.

Considering the increasing privatization of public schools in the United States, the authors of this chapter utilize contractarianism to critique neoliberal practices. Textual evidence is drawn on to show the influence of contractarian arguments on neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. After an explanation of the contractarianism of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the authors show that the neoliberal versions of the social contract are both incompatible with the tradition writ large and internally inconsistent philosophically. Rather than a public characterized by privatization, and the undermining of public schools that results, the authors argue for a public in which responsibility, obligation, and freedom are not contradictory terms, and a vision of public schools in which teachers successfully bring about those ethical goals.

This chapter examines the view that state creation requires the existence of a normatively legitimate government. It begins by defining governmental legitimacy, arguing that it is best analysed in terms of the moral justifiability of individual acts of governance, whether viewed individually or in aggregate. Next, it considers what it means for institutions, social conventions, and legal principles to be legitimate before moving on to consider the negative argument that no theory of state creation that excludes a criterion of governmental legitimacy could ever be morally plausible. Having dismissed this objection as mistaken, the chapter then examines a range of legitimacy-based reconstructions, which draw respectively upon the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke. Each position is critiqued and dismissed as an implausible approach to the law of state creation.

Hobbes condemns liberty of conscience by stressing its incendiary repercussions on social stability and political sovereignty. Religious dissenters fashion themselves as sovereigns, emboldening them to do whatever they want rather than obey the state. For Hobbes, invocations to conscience are mere assertions of opinion – deeply held and felt, such that individuals insist on acting in accordance with them, but opinions nonetheless. While Hobbes anticipates the danger of liberty of conscience, he also offers a potential solution to this very problem – civic education – and invites us to reflect on how we might cultivate consensus through attempts to shape the conscience of dissenters. The possibility of peaceful co-existence becomes, at some point, about the project of persuasion, for Hobbes, such that invocations of conscience will abate over time and the threat of liberty of conscience to political authority may be tamed.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

Thomas Hobbes’ affinity for certain core conceptions of liberalism has been noted by critics and admirers alike. Nonetheless, these proto-liberal aspects have tended to be overshadowed by his more obvious institutional support for absolute monarchy. This tension has sparked generations of disagreement. While building on familiar scholarly debates, the chapter sheds light on three less explored Hobbesian conceptual revolutions. The first is Hobbes’ distinction between persons and individuals. The ascendancy of the individual at the expense of the personage gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among such individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on an ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. Finally, the Hobbesian theory model of solidarity is distinguished by its aspiration to uniformity. What Hobbes castigates as asperity on the part of individual subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of discrepant wills challenges uniformity, but also because such persons are representative of differences.

John Robertson explores the terms in which Spinoza adapted sacred history, as recorded in the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament, to support his political thinking in the Theological–Political Treatise (1670). Rather than reading this work in the light of Spinoza’s philosophy, the focus of most scholarship, Robertson argues that Spinoza sought to understand sacred history on its own terms, as constituted by the three ‘constants’ of revealed religion: prophecy, a sacred text, and the ‘Word of God’ contained within the text. Spinoza’s understanding of these concepts is shown to have shaped the lessons which he proceeded to draw from the history of the Hebrews, their religious customs and their commonwealth. Spinoza’s approach to sacred history is then compared with that of Hobbes, drawing out both similarities and differences. A final section asks what became of this interest in sacred history as a source for political thinking in the Enlightenment, suggesting that its repudiation by some (such as Rousseau) was offset by a shift in the interest of others (such as Vico) from the Hebrews to the gentiles.

Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

When did the emotions become political? It would be natural to view a formal political analysis of emotions as a classical phenomenon that was reprised under new and more decisive terms in late humanism and reimagined in the eighteenth century. In such a history we would expect to encounter the work of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. It would also be natural to take Hobbes and Vico at their word and read this recovery of the political dimension of emotion as a rejection of medieval philosophy. I will propose the opposite: the grounds for this political turn were laid in late medieval scholasticism. The precedent for humanist and Enlightenment-era political thought about emotion lies with a repudiated scholasticism and its reinvention of classical Greek thought. It is the history of rhetoric that reveals this turn to the political. The thread that links these transformations together is the political reception and re-absorption of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the modern assimilation of the Rhetoric began in earnest with the most influential statecraft treatise of the Middle Ages, De regimine principum, written about 1277 by the scholastic theologian Giles of Rome.

The scepticism of the period from roughly 1645 to 1680 prompted philosophers’ attempts to rethink theology and moral and civil philosophy in their search for ideas concerning the common and the public good. Ralph Cudworth’s effort to overcome the challenges posed by fragmentation in religion and politics and to develop a philosophy helpful in uniting society, but not at the expense of liberty, demonstrate that Neoplatonism was an important force during that period. In a sceptical era, John Selden contributed to particularism in natural law. A discussion of Sir Robert Filmer’s life and key political ideas together with the principles of political economy he espoused follows. Given the disintegration of moral theology in that period, the commercialization of societal ties seems to have been unstoppable. Against the Macphersonian critique of possessive individualism, the chapter puts forward the opening argument that both Hobbes and Locke sought to tame the harsh society characterized by the use of credit they saw before them and that they chose to do so by means of political philosophy and natural law.

“Faith: Impersonating Faith, or How We Came to Have Faith in Fictions” analyzes how faith was taken up by Reformation theologians, by political theorist Thomas Hobbes, and by Aphra Behn in her earliest prose fiction. The chapter takes up “faith” at a key point in its history, in order to account for what it meant before secularization and for what its role would be in a secular epistemology, politics, and culture. It analyzes Thomas Hobbes and Aphra Behn in order to see how they link the idea of faith to the emergent category of fiction: In Hobbes, the political project of contract relies on fictionality for its form, while in Behn, the fictional project of the nascent novel relies on faith for its form.

Chapter 3 revisits the republicanism of the free state. Historians have disagreed about the extent and nature of republican thinking during the free state. Some historians have attached little importance to republicanism, claiming that it was inconspicuous, that ‘republican ideology played only a minor role’ and that it only properly emerged after the free state. Other historians have challenged such arguments and have accentuated the republican arguments in favour of the free state. Taking its cue from such historians, the chapter demonstrates that republican defences of the free state were loud and clear from the beginning of 1649 until 1652. It was repeatedly argued that only a free state could guarantee liberty. The chapter also points out the seriousness with which many royalists, Presbyterians and other enemies of the free state took its republicanism. They questioned every aspect of republicanism; for them, a free state was a disastrous form of state and, more importantly, the idea that it safeguarded liberty was a hollow sham.

In Chapter 8 I explore key moments of the reception of Plutarch in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. I look at key aspects of the resonance of Plutarch in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). I also discuss the significance of Philemon Holland’s (1552–1637) translation of Plutarch’s essay “How to Profit from your Enemies.” I show how this essay (which Hobbes read in the original Greek and Latin translations but also consulted in Holland’s version) can shed new light on Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).