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“... 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 ...”

“... to have been mediated through Latin and English translations, he knew Plutarch well through Sir Thomas North’s version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with Ovid, Virgil, Plautus and Terence, Seneca and Plutarch, as well ...”

“... law becomes the rule of those empowered to enforce the law. This worry – usually attributed to Thomas Hobbes, but it too can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle – is often expressed in relation to the rule of judges. But it is really a worry about rule by officials. They might be judges, but they could also be police officers, administrators ...”

“... the most penetrating and uncompromising thinker of the civil wars, authority’s friend Thomas Hobbes? The cast list remains dominated by Levellers and sects. Though Hill’s confrontational stance has yielded to scholarly circumspection, the category of radicalism continues to nourish, in Dmitri Levitin’s words, ‘the idea that critical or ...”

“... sustained and unyielding. Much of the essay on Bramhall, for example, is given over to denouncing Hobbes, including this memorable piece of social and intellectual condescension: ‘Thomas Hobbes was one of those extraordinary little upstarts whom the chaotic motions of the Renaissance tossed into an eminence which ...”

“... of Bismarck, of Napoleon III, on the Empire born of Queen Elizabeth I, on that Papacy of which Thomas Hobbes said that ‘it is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned on its own grave.’ In this splendid pre-war novel we meet Thomas Quayne, a successful businessman, and his smart wife ...”

“... the following textual emendation:From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the battle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and ...”

“... the liberal version of negative liberty to what he has preferred to call the ‘neo-Roman’ idea. Hobbes has long been his principal villain. He is, for Skinner, the philosopher who systematically replaced the ‘neo-Roman’ – or republican – conception of free citizenship with the restricted notion of liberty as nothing more than the absence of external ...”

“... to be an actual crowd and become a metaphor? These are Hobbesian themes and questions. Indeed, Thomas Hobbes is almost the only philosopher mentioned by name and the only one spoken of, in The Human Province, with modified approval – it is mainly his longevity that Canetti admires. Yet Hobbes’s criticism of ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... at the BFI in 2016. The bracing goes on. The title of his new memoir presents him as a modern-day Thomas Hobbes come to demonstrate, in as disobliging a manner as possible, that human existence tends to the nasty, brutish and short. What’s more, it is itself a reiteration. Every Man for Himself, and God against All was the original title of one of ...”

“... For nearly a millennium, European states have been at war with one another. For as Hobbes observed, war consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known ... For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary ...”

“... ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God ‘is perfect freedom’. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe ...”

“... some classic writers in political theory, not all of whom were convinced democrats – Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke and Kant – and the book is a contribution to the history of political thought as well as to contemporary debate (a historically oriented companion volume to Waldron’s more purely analytic treatment of the same topic in Law and Disagreement, also ...”