During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.

This uninhibited book of Collingwood’s rounds off his contribution to philosophy in a fiercely personal style. Declaring his unbounded admiration for the Leviathan of Hobbes and following its fourfold structure, Collingwood offers a systematic account of man, society, civilization, and “barbarism” – the last being understood as active hostility towards civilization, or revolt against it. Collingwood’s thoughts on the meaning of “society” and “civility,” as well as on questions of peace and war, remain very much alive; of particular interest here are his distinction between “eristic” and “dialectical” approaches to disagreement, and his conception of a body politic as the scene of a “dialectical” relationship between social and non-social elements. Other discussions impose greater distance on a modern reader – among them his briskly affirmative treatment of the role of a “ruling class,” of our entry into a presumed “social contract,” and of the “intelligent exploitation of nature.”

The implications for morality and natural law of Hobbes’s skilful employment of Neoplatonist metaphysics such as Avicenna’s, entailing a sharp division between the human soul and the human body, are spelled out in Chapter 3. This shows that the concept of need, rather than right is central to Hobbes’s natural law and political theory. Judgements concerning needs, including the needs of others, represent a constant source of legitimacy for acting in the state of nature and in the commonwealth. A thorough analysis of the doctrine of necessity in Leviathan, Hobbes’s masterpiece, follows. The superior and absolute sovereignty that Leviathan evaluates and proposes is the true and scientific concept of sovereignty in a commonwealth, by reference to the needs of human nature and also in accordance with divine command. Hobbes exploits his doctrine of metaphysics of necessity to explain that that type of absolute sovereignty is compatible with freedom; after all, each free act of every human being is necessary in the sense of a metaphysics of necessity.

In Chapter 8 I explore key moments of the reception of Plutarch in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. I look at key aspects of the resonance of Plutarch in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). I also discuss the significance of Philemon Holland’s (1552–1637) translation of Plutarch’s essay “How to Profit from your Enemies.” I show how this essay (which Hobbes read in the original Greek and Latin translations but also consulted in Holland’s version) can shed new light on Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).

This chapter examines how Hobbes tempers apocalyptic thought to advance his political philosophy. What troubles Hobbes about such thought is its potential to spur continuous upheaval. Apocalyptic thought anticipates perfection – a divine kingdom that will wipe away corruption. The failure to realize utopian hopes breeds endless dissatisfaction, disruption, and instability in politics. But rather than abandon apocalyptic ideals, Hobbes co-opts them. Specifically, he reinterprets the doctrine of the kingdom of God to make it safe for politics. He arrives at an interpretation that denies, at present, all claims to represent God’s kingdom by prophets and sects challenging the sovereign’s authority. For now, the kingdom of God can only take one form – what Hobbes calls the natural kingdom of God. Importantly, the Leviathan-state is a manifestation of the natural kingdom of God. By identifying God’s kingdom with the Leviathan-state, Hobbes transforms a Christian doctrine used to justify rebellion into one bolstering the sovereign’s authority.

This chapter argues that Thomas Hobbes’s imagining of the original events of biblical authorship and transmission in Leviathan play a pivotal role in his radical arguments about sovereignty and its relationship to religion. It contends that Hobbes’s emphasis on the Bible as the product of multiple layers of history is not in itself secularizing. Instead, this chapter focuses on the materialist metaphysical foundations of Hobbes’s account of the Bible’s production, transmission, and reception. The radical ways Hobbes represents the Bible’s origins and the events of its textual history buttress his argument for the sovereign’s total authority over all religious matters pertaining to the public. This is because they have the effect of eradicating any means, other than the sovereign’s wholly secular decision, by which a communal biblical meaning and authority might be actualized, including any means by which “the Bible” can be collectively recognized as such. Hobbes’s subjection of Scripture to the sovereign is thus predicated on metaphysical assumptions inimical to human participation in revelation, assumptions undergirding the untraditional scenes of biblical origin he imagines.

In this chapter, the author explores the book of Job for a perspective on the modern Darwinian Problem of evil. He concurs with recent scholars who reject the commonplace reading of Job, i.e., that God refuses to answer Job’s question: how can his suffering be just? He concurs with Carol Newsom that in the divine speeches at the end, God answers Job indirectly in the form of carefully crafted symbolic poetics, the rhetorical structure and imagery of which radically reconstruct Deuteronomic tradition on God and suffering. The author proposes that the treatment of God and wild animals in Job makes the Darwinian configuration of animal suffering more plausible on canonical theism than commonly supposed. He further proposes that Job provides grounds for belief that the Jewish/Christian God will defeat evils for animals and include them in the messianic eschatological realm. Job offers a religiously framed aesthetic perspective on Darwinian evil that helps us to recover the “theistic sight” in nature that Darwinian discoveries have obscured.