Volume 56, Number 12 · July 16, 2009
Hobbes & the Halo of Power
By Blair Worden
Hobbes and Republican Liberty
by Quentin Skinner
Cambridge University Press, 245 pp., $70.00; $22.99 (paper)
Quentin Skinner, the leading historian of political thought of his generation, who has recently retired from the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge, has among his other interests been writing on Thomas Hobbes for more than forty years.[1] A rigorous student of Hobbes's logic, he has nonetheless always sought, as he now puts it, to bring him 'down from the philosophical heights.' He relates Hobbes's arguments to the background against which he wrote, the civil strife of mid-seventeenth-century England. At that time the collapse of the nation's institutions, and the breakdown of the government's censorship of the press, produced a torrent of books and pamphlets carrying fresh political ideas.
Review, 4799 words
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