15 - Between Hobbes and Locke

Summary

Yet another comparison between Hobbes and Locke: or at last, a sensible location for the Politica? Neither really, but Lawson began his public career with an attack on Leviathan, and his Politica fades from view in the shadow of Locke, so some debt is owed to the Hobbes–Locke multinational. This debt has accrued interest inasmuch as I have discussed Lawson and the Allegiance Controversy with hardly a mention of Locke. In the terms of the traditional historiography of political thought the central questions might still be seen to be whether Lawson really influenced Locke and if so what this might tell us about the elusive relationship between Locke and Hobbes.

Lawson, albeit reluctantly, was one of the first to contribute to the anti- Leviathan literature which was to rumble on throughout the century. The literature was politically and stylistically heterogeneous but, as Goldie has emphasised, it was largely held together by a common theological postulate. In this respect, Lawson was typical and perhaps helped set the tone, along with Hobbes's fellow exile John Bramhall, for the later huntings of Leviathan. Like Hobbes, Lawson saw God as a sovereign power, but he could never be tied to a simplex specification of divinity. His earlier arguments with Baxter, and at one remove Twiss (‘Amica diss.’), had denied the adequacy of any simple understanding of God, and the attack on Leviathan is explicitly on the political consequences of such ‘simplexity’.