Latitudinarianism,secular theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s influence in George Mackenzie’s Religio Stoici (1663)

This article revisits George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s Religio Stoici (1663) which is often acclaimed as the first in a venerable series of imitations of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642) as well as a possible influence for John Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682). By contrast, this articles returns to the charged contemporary atmosphere that prevailed in Scotland in 1663, following the controversial re-establishment of Episcopalianism the previous year. Combining an instinctive epistemological scepticism with an audacious and polemical anticlericalism, Mackenzie’s tract attacked dogmatic intolerance and denominational exclusivity and instead advanced a courageous, solitary and very public plea for peaceful religious practice.     

Hobbes as Political Theologian

Abstract

Although an orphaned subject among scholars of religion, the theology of Thomas Hobbes is now among the most contested issues in Hobbes studies and the study of early liberal political theory. This essay maps the state of the question and offers a theological appraisal of it. In so doing it attempts to critique a leading reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan by highlighting its attack on civil religion and endorsement of a biblical political theology. The relationship between Hobbes’s political and theological views in Leviathan also receives sustained attention.     

Norman Gash and the Making of Mr Secretary Peel

In May 1961, the firm of Longmans published the first volume of Norman Gash's monumental life of Sir Robert Peel. Mr Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel before 1830 was hailed at the time as a landmark and has proved surprisingly durable as an interpretation of Peel's early life and formation. This essay is concerned with locating Gash's work within its political, biographical, and historiographical context. It begins by considering the reaction of Peel family members to Gash's biography, before tracing the antecedents of his historical preoccupations and intellectual development in the years leading up to the publication of Mr Secretary Peel. It presents a wide range of new evidence relating to Gash's life and emergence as a political and parliamentary historian, drawing upon sources which have come to light in the decade since his death in May 2009.     

Feminine Wiles and Masculine Weakness: Seventeenth-Century Visual Responses to Tasso’s Crusade

This essay offers a political reading of the artistic choices made by seventeenth-century painters in their depictions of the heroines of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581). It discusses the political subtext of Tasso’s epic poem by exploring the roles Tasso assigns to his oriental heroines and their representation in seventeenth-century paintings. Painters and patrons alike were particularly enthusiastic about the love stories that developed around Jerusalem. But Tasso is promoting a crusade, and the visual focus of later painters on Tasso’s seductive female protagonists and their submission to Christian warriors, suggests that their aim was to display the delights that await those who join a military expedition to conquer the Holy Land.     

Hobbes ou la crise de l'état baroque

Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan presented a paradigm of the social contract that has proven foundational in Western political thought. A proper understanding of the philosopher’s thought is thus of paramount importance. I argue that today’s case for a religiously tolerant Hobbes has missed an important part of the historical record. I first consider an obscure but important document, the second edition of the Humble Proposals. It demonstrates that leading members of a seventeenth century Christian denomination, the Independents, considered a state-enforced confession of faith. Independents are generally seen as tolerant, and one of the arguments for Hobbesian toleration is that Hobbes endorsed them. But the second edition of the Humble Proposals aligns with the possibility in Hobbes that the civil sovereign will impose part III of Leviathan on the Universities and treat its contents as a legally required confession of faith – one that may be necessary for security, and the avoidance of civil war. Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency alone cannot be used to argue that his work leads to religious toleration. The evidence I present reinforces an earlier assessment and alongside other evidence points to the return of the intolerant Hobbes.     

Natural Law in Dryden’s Translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio

This article examines the influence of natural law philosophy upon four of Dryden’s translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio published in his final collection Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700): “Sigismonda and Guiscardo”, “The Wife of Bath, her Tale”, “Palamon and Arcite” and “Cymon and Iphigenia”. Situating Dryden’s tales alongside the writings of his philosophical, political and literary contemporaries as well as their classical sources, it argues that Dryden’s distinctive choice of vocabulary and innovative amplifications of his originals constitute a subtly provocative interrogation of the use of natural law rhetoric within the seventeenth century.     

Drones,Hobbes, and Liberal Enchantment

ABSTRACT

This article reconceptualizes military drones by drawing on early-modern debates about the sanctity of political power. Ian Shaw has claimed that the proliferation and automation of drones threatens to subject humanity to a robotic regime of control, which he describes as the ultimate instantiation of Thomas Hobbes’s artificial sovereignty. I argue instead that the United States’ drone strategy is closely informed by a liberal political theology that can be traced back to Hobbes’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opponents, Samuel Clarke and Nehemiah Grew. These physico-theologians held that constitutionally balanced polities such as Britain were important vessels for divine providence. Today, a parallel faith that the United States represents humanity’s best hope is used to justify the extralegal and secretive bombing of territories that are deemed to be profane in comparison with America. Hobbes’s demystification of politics in Leviathan provides the platform for a critique of this modern form of liberal enchantment.     

Zu papyri osloenses III

The sixth Roman ode of Horace has usually been dated to 29/28 B.C. from the reference to the great temple restoration programme in the first stanza. This dating, however, tends to affect our reading of the whole cycle. An ‘inner’ dramatic date deliberately established by the poet (post Actium but before 28 B.C.) should not be mistaken for the time of writing (after 28, probably about 25 B.C.). There are even calculated effects arising from the poet's use of a dramatic date. Moreover, the poem is not independent to the effect that it is a self‐contained expression of the poet's political stance. Its provoking diagnosis of contemporary society is a warning reflecting Augustus’ policy and paving the way for reforms. It is instructive to compare epode XVI, to which III 6 bears resemblances which seem to support the late dating of the epode (cf. the author's Horaz und Actium 1984).     

Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood Saw in Hobbes

Summary

R. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule.     

Constitutionalists,Despots, Whigs,and Revisionists: Tudor Parliamentary History in the 20th Century

The 20th century was the great age of Tudor parliamentary history. This essay examines the contributions and profound changes to the field made by the leading historians of the era, especially Sir John Neale and Sir Geoffrey Elton. Taking as its starting point the whiggish ideas of Stubbs's Constitutional History of England, it traces the impact of A.F. Pollard, G.M. Trevelyan, and Sir Lewis Namier on the field. At its core, though, lie the often acrimonious differences of opinion between Neale and his pupil, Elton. For Neale the Elizabethan parliaments were characterised by an increasingly puritanical Commons eager to wrest control of debates on religion and the succession away from the queen. In so doing this created a constitutional clash that would eventually lead to civil war in the mid 17th century. This ‘orthodoxy’ was savagely critiqued by a revisionist ‘school’ led by Elton that dismantled the interpretation of Neale and replaced it with an institution that was not dominated by political conflict but by largely consensual politics. It was also a position that gave equal weight to the Lords and to the importance of the business of parliament – legislation. The revisionists were masters of critique and highly effective at demolishing Neale, but did little to replace his theories or to explain religio‐political conflict – in doing so it could be argued that they killed the subject. The essay ends by suggesting some new approaches to Tudor parliaments that could help revitalise the subject.     

Antimodernist Antecedents in Early Canadian Modernism: Archibald MacMechan’s “A Ballade of Canadian Literature” and F.R. Scott’s “the Canadian Authors Meet”

ABSTRACT

Archibald MacMechan’s regular column in the Montreal Standard entitled “The Dean’s Window” (1906–1933) is an important index to educated antimodernist literary values. MacMechan brought his reading of world literature into his appraisals of the Canadian scene, through his groundbreaking work, Headwaters of Canadian Literature(1924). In a 1912 “Dean’s Window” column, MacMechan, a published poet, opened with a poem of his own, “The Ballade of Canadian Literature,” which anticipated F.R. Scott’s “The Canadian Authors Meet”—itself a seminal work of early Canadian modernism. By no means binaries, the degree to which modernism and antimodernism could resemble each other is manifest in MacMechan’s and Scott’s poems, even though Scott’s poem eviscerates the Canadian Authors Association, an organization of which MacMechan was a founding member.     

Collingwood's New Leviathan and classical elite theory

R. G. Collingwood's New Leviathan (1942) presents an account of two ‘dialectical’ political processes that are ongoing in any body politic. Existing scholarship has already covered the first: a dialectic between a ‘social’ and a ‘non-social’ element, which Collingwood identifies in Hobbes. This essay elucidates a second: a dialectic between Liberals and Conservatives, which regulates the ‘percolation’ of liberty and the rate of recruitment into what Collingwood calls ‘the ruling class’. The details of this second dialectic are to be found not in Hobbes, but in the work of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, yet Collingwood's connections to these fathers of ‘classical elite theory’ have not previously been discussed.     

Witnessing Whittaker Chambers: Communism,McCarthyism and the Confessional Self

ABSTRACT

Hobbes left a complicated legacy for the English Whigs. They thought that his Leviathan was all too powerful, but they found other elements in his thought more appealing – mostly his anticlericalism. Still, the precise relationship between Hobbes and the Whigs has remained underexplored, while some still argue that Hobbes was simply too much of an absolutist for the Whigs to rely on his political ideas. This article attempts to show that Hobbes was, in fact, recruited by proto- and early Whigs for their causes. It shows how Hobbesian ideas were used in the toleration debates of the 1660s and 1670s, and even in debates on human reason and liberty of conscience. Then it demonstrates how similar Hobbesian principles, and even phrases, were used subsequently in the formative years of Whiggism from the 1680s to the 1720s, by thinkers who were worried, as Hobbes was, about the political aspirations of the Church. By collecting a series of prominent thinkers who are associated with Whiggism and who engaged with Hobbes in various ways – including Buckingham, Marvell, Cavendish, Warren, Blount, Tindal, Trenchard and Gordon – this article shows that Hobbes was employed systematically in the service of Whig causes, such as limited toleration, civil religion and an opposition to religious persecution.     

Undermining Obligation to God: Hobbes’s Religious Rhetoric and False Forms of Obligation

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Hobbes’s use of religious rhetoric, specifically his definitions of the terms grace, faith, and future words in his explanation of the nature and origins of obligation. Through categorization and analysis of Hobbes’s different forms of obligation, paying special attention to the religious rhetoric of the false forms, it becomes evident that Hobbes’s view of obligation is designed not only to establish a political order, but to undermine man’s obligation to God, and as such, remove the possibility of competing obligation in the life of the citizen, and thereby reduce the cause of civil wars.     

Parties in Parliament in the 18th Century: The Demolition of Robert Walcott and its Consequences*

The failure of Robert Walcott's attempted ‘Namierisation’ of Queen Anne's house of commons in the 1950s is now an accepted historiographical fact. Scholars working on late Stuart politics inevitably dismiss Walcott's work as misguided and misleading, and instead take as a given the existence of a two‐party structure as delineated by the standard authority on the subject, Geoffrey Holmes. This article returns to the controversy over ‘party’ in the 1960s, which reached a climax in 1967 with the publication of Holmes's magnum opus and J.H. Plumb's Ford Lectures. The purpose is not to revisit the debate, which was decided conclusively at the time, but to explore the context in which Walcott and his critics were writing; more specifically the connection between Walcott's work and the approach to 18th‐century political history pioneered by Sir Lewis Namier. Using private correspondence between the principals, it argues that Walcott did not properly follow Namier's methods, and was identified as a Namierite largely because Namier was unwilling, for personal reasons, to disown him. In the long run, this reluctance proved damaging, accelerating the decline in Namier's reputation in the 1960s and the shift towards different forms of political history.     

Francis Slade on Political Forms and Their Formation

The task of the article is to introduce the reader to one of the essential teachings of Francis Slade's understanding of political philosophy. After a brief presentation of why Slade examines political philosophy through the lens of form and what the principal political forms are, this article presents the form of premodern political philosophy by explicating what of its fundamental teachings modern political philosophy rejects and denies. The remainder of the work presents the modern form of the political by means of tracing the essential moments of the genesis of this form in Machiavelli's Prince and in Hobbes’ Leviathan. The argument focuses primarily on their revolutionary understanding of the human condition and its need to be transformed, or how man is no longer understood as a political animal and has necessarily become the subject of the state.     

Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the poetics of figuration in the English revolution

Though English humanists tended to emphasize the continuity between rhetoric and poetics, Thomas Hobbes confronted the tensions between those linguistic arts as they were practised in the early modern period. This essay argues that Hobbes’s reinvestment in rhetorical eloquence was accompanied by a renewed understanding of figurative expression’s uniquely poetic effects. Breaking from royalist writers who often insisted upon the literal truth of monarchical imagery, Hobbes adapted an approach to metaphor honed by parliamentarian polemicists in the English Revolution. In both his literary-critical epistle, the “Answer to Davenant”, and Leviathan, Hobbes used an awareness of language’s poetic dimensions to revise many of the master tropes of early modern discourse, deconstructing the epic invocation to the muse and fundamentally transforming the body politic. In the process, he demonstrated the power of poetic figuration as a philosophical instrument for collective knowledge.     

Hobbes and Corneille on Political Representation

In this essay, I compare the meaning of political representation in Hobbes’ Leviathan and Corneille's Cinna. For both authors, a monarch is a “representer” and representation is a necessary condition of effective sovereignty. However, the term “representation” means something entirely different in Hobbes and in Corneille. For the former, it means acting and speaking in the name of a multitude and in its absence; for the latter, it means acting and speaking in the presence of a political public, with the intention to impress this audience. I would like to argue that our late modern (or postmodern) conception of sovereignty can be seen as being (unconsciously) based on the conjunction of Hobbes’ and Corneille's different notions of representation.     

Naturalism and its political dangers: Jakob Thomasius against Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise. A study and the translation of Thomasius’ text

ABSTRACT

Jakob Thomasius was a well-known professor who in 1670 chose to address a new anonymous text in a faculty lecture. The text was Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (TTP). Five years earlier, Thomasius had attacked libertine philosophers in two other faculty lectures, and now explicitly links those lectures with this critique of the TTP. This article examines the argumentative strategy and structure of Thomasius’ 1670 lecture, in the light of those 1665 lectures, to see what it was that upset the Leipzig professor. Thomasius’ text is a rarity in that it aims to critique the TTP primarily on political grounds, not religious, but this sees Thomasius’ fear of naturalism assume strongly political tones of fear of faction. This article assesses Thomasius’ version of moderate censorship, the link he draws between Hobbes and innovation, his debt to Comenius, and the coherence of his defence of moderate Lutheranism. This article also provides a translation of Thomasius’ heretofore untranslated text.     

Improvisation and Hybrid Genres: Reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

ABSTRACT

In the first section I ask two questions: what sort of a poem is Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and what is the immediate experience of reading it in sequence? These two questions are the practical equivalents of the main terms of my title. I try to answer them by reconstructing a first reading of the poem in the light of my own experience and the imagined one of the first readers of the poem. I suggest that two terms—accretion and elimination—are helpful here and that, in some ways, the structure and sequential experiencing of the poem resemble the structures of extended nineteenth-century musical forms. In the second section, I reverse perspective and take a position at the end of the poem. From such a point, it is easier to find what the poem has included and eliminated and this, in turn, suggests the kind of poem that it is. In the third section I tackle the terms “improvisation” and “hybrid genres” directly, link them with my earlier arguments, and engage with some theorists, especially Bakhtin. In particular, I argue against the view that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage dissolves genre but argue that genres are nevertheless “open categories.” My conclusion is less definite. I confess to difficulties that still bother me.