Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 16701740

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Anticlerical legacies explores the reception of Thomas Hobbess political and religious ideas by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deists and freethinkers, such as Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and many others. It shows that these writers were indebted to various aspects of Hobbess thought, that they engaged with his ideas explicitly in their published and unpublished works, and that they invoked his authority consistently despite the explosive reputation of the monster of Malmesbury.
Hobbes emerges from this study as a major source of anticlerical ideas and toolssomething that his contemporary admirers and critics seemed to agree on but that has been understudied in the scholarship. The battle of Hobbes and his successors against the orthodoxy was also a battle for civil peace, and the rich anticlerical legacies that they left remained influential long after their lifetime.

Author Bio

Elad Carmel is a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress and a Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellow in 18th-Century Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.