Thomas Hobbes and the Revolution in Political Thought

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 and lived till 1679. His life thus extends from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the beginning of the Popish Plot; from the year in which the independence of Protestant England was finally ensured to the period when a threat to restore Catholicism in England was less a political reality than the stunt of a Parliamentary party. The Revolution of 1640 occurred after Hobbes was 50 years old, when his main ideas had taken form. But they had been shaped by the intellectual forces of his world.KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyPrimitive CommunismDirect RevelationEnglish WorkTrue ReligionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.