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“... these, not radical revisions of transmitted texts and world pictures, occupied the likes of Thomas Thomas and Cantrell Legge. Format and coverage conspire to make the book seem an exercise in that nostalgic obsession with the minutiae of the local past to which Cambridge dons succumb even more readily than their colleagues in other ancient seats of ...”

“... Here are the nominees for the greatest bad argument in political theory. They are: Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the Republic. Why them? Each of the candidates is hallowed as a Penguin Classic. Each has been foisted on freshman generations in Pol Phil 101 ...”

“... reduced to saying that he could get one hand between the top of his head and the hat of his friend Thomas Hobbes, who was notably tall. The ways in which the so-called new learning of the 17th century turned the inquiry into the human condition towards the body is the subject of Roy Porter’s Flesh in the Age of Reason (2003), an important study ...”

“... to enclosures, and he makes many perceptive observations about it: he suggests, for example, that Thomas Hobbes could have acquired his distaste for popular government by observing the riotous behaviour of the commons in some disputes over common lands during his young days at Malmesbury. The book is not really about riots as much as it is about ...”

“... to editing the legal works. The result ranks among the greatest works of Victorian scholarship. Thomas Carlyle called it ‘the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this generation’. Spedding received no payment for his vast labours, but was allowed to buy copies of the finished work at the trade price. He professed ...”

“... absence of government and law. The system of natural liberty, he says, is not as Adam Smith but as Thomas Hobbes described it: laissez-faire is a futile and dangerous war of all against all. Markets are frail and fallible phenomena that depend on, among other things, currencies, property rights, legal systems, welfare systems, police forces, contractual ...”

“... not a cleric (like Mersenne), not a physician (like Harvey), not a family retainer (like Hobbes), not a court philosopher (like Galileo), and definitely not a mechanic and schoolmaster (like Beeckman) – how did you go about living that life? How did you find the material resources to keep yourself going and the cultural resources to lay claim to a ...”

“... sometimes imagine: there were many devout Christians who were sceptical of the whole phenomenon. Thomas Hobbes was one of several who saw it as a metaphor for mental illness. Spinoza seems to have believed the same. From the early years of the Renaissance, plenty of physicians claimed that demonic possession had natural causes. So did some of their ...”

“... With the inevitable exceptions of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx, it is doubtful whether any political thinker has inspired more sustained imbecility among his friends and enemies than Edmund Burke. And, despite first appearances, his appeal is far less predictable than theirs. Both Aquinas and Marx were in the first place theoreticians: the latter died at his desk, the former should have done ...”

“... environment than ours. Peter was, I think, a political scientist; there were early editions of Thomas Hobbes on the shelves. Ilse typed up John Beaglehole’s edition of Cook’s journals. Only occasionally did my father seem to feel that the refugees might have been a little impatient with provincial life in the South Pacific. My friend Graham Percy ...”

“... Norman’s studiously unattributed materials is a freestanding memorandum written in 1671 by Thomas Hobbes, who in 1623 had been employed as Bacon’s secretary. Addressed as a private note to Hobbes’s patron, the Earl of Devonshire, it exhibits a degree of authenticity that biographers will kill for. Bacon, it ...”

“... in particular make it possible to identify Burton’s circle of scholarly friends, among whom Thomas Hobbes was the most famous. Many others were famous in the history of early Oxford science: Henry Briggs, Thomas Lydyat, John Napier, Edmund Gunter. Almost three quarters of his collection, in fact, was made up of ...”

“... state. The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductive party, with Thomas Hobbes at its head, saw human motivation as entirely egoistic at root (Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of law which protects the weak ...”

“... When he turned to politics, Oakeshott’s intellectual allegiance proved to be the same. It was on Hobbes that he set out to build a theory of the state. For both men, Leviathan – ‘the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language’, as Oakeshott termed it – was to be the touchstone for any modern ...”

“... on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an attempt to ...”