Abstract
Hobbes’s influence on seventeenth century thought is a topic which is often taken for granted, rather than investigated seriously. Assumptions about Hobbes’s impact on other writers are based frequently upon an anachronistic conception of Hobbes’s canonic importance. To modern writers Hobbes tops the list of important seventeenth century philosophers, and on the basis of this assessment it is all too readily assumed that other important philosophers were necessarily influenced by his work. This tendency is most problematic when Hobbes’s ideas are simply juxtaposed with another writer to produce a correspondence, which is held to demonstrate a meaningful link or influence. However, it is necessary to be aware of the dangers of such an approach. Using a modem rather than a contemporary understanding of Hobbes can mislead as to the nature of the intellectual debt. Our understanding of what Hobbes said may be very different to what his contemporaries thought he was saying; their sense of what was new and shocking about his work, and what was conventional and unoriginal, can often be odds with modern interpretations of Hobbes’s work. Clearly all of these factors will have a bearing upon the nature of Hobbes’s supposed influence.
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Parkin, J. (2003). Taming the Leviathan: Reading Hobbes in Seventeenth-Century Europe. In: Hochstrasser, T.J., Schröder, P. (eds) Early Modern Natural Law Theories. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 186. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0391-8_2
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