Anticlerical legacies explores the reception of Thomas Hobbes’s political and religious ideas by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deists and freethinkers, such as Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and many others.
It shows that these writers were indebted to various aspects of Hobbes’s thought, that they engaged with his ideas explicitly in their published and unpublished works, and that they invoked his authority consistently despite the explosive reputation of the ‘monster of Malmesbury’. Hobbes emerges from this study as a major source of anticlerical ideas and tools — something that his contemporary admirers and critics seemed to agree on but that has been understudied in the scholarship. The battle of Hobbes and his successors against the orthodoxy was also a battle for civil peace, and the rich anticlerical legacies that they left remained influential long after their lifetime.
By:
Elad Carmel Imprint: Manchester University Press Country of Publication: United Kingdom Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 14mm
Weight: 491g ISBN:9781526168825 ISBN 10: 1526168820 Series:Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain Pages: 248 Publication Date:01 February 2024 Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
ELT Advanced
,
Primary
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction 1 The early days of English deism (c. 1670–1695) 2 The deist controversy (1696–1710) 3 The age of freethinking (1711–1723) 4 The last battle (1724–1740) Conclusion -- .
Elad Carmel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä. -- .