UC Berkeley

Rejected loudly by his own contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes remained notorious—a practically unspeakable name—for generations after his death, and the entire subsequent development of political practice and theory in England (and Scotland later on) could be seen as a frenzied reaction to his work. And, yet, the argument here is that Hobbes’s political testament was nevertheless in essence quietly realized. An underlying conservatism came to dominate 18th century England in ways that were extra-political, but which would continue to make a profound impact on the political reality of the state.