Humanities & Social Sciences
January 2024
Anticlerical legacies
The deistic reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670–1740
by Elad Carmel
Anticlerical legacies explores the reception of Thomas Hobbes's 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indebted to various aspects of Hobbes's thought, that they engaged with his ideas explicitly in their published and unpublished works, and that they invoked his authority consistently despite the explosive reputation of the 'monster of Malmesbury'.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 tools-something 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.
