This dissertation addresses inter alia the problem of certain intertextual discontinuities across Thomas Hobbes’s oeuvre regarding the issue of ecclesiology. I find that these disparities did not result from a change in Hobbes’s private opinions, but from the regicide of 1649 as an event that liberated Hobbes to unveil his Erastian views without violating the civil laws. Ecclesiological differences between Hobbes’s pre-regicidal texts are explained by reference to their divergent modes of textual distribution. I then argue that although Hobbes sometimes withheld his private opinions about religion from the public, the esoteric reading of Hobbes’s texts systematically distorts interpretation. Finally, I argue that Hobbes’s theory of liberty as non-impediment permitted the existence of immaterial impediments; that this theory was coherent with Hobbes’s materialist metaphysics; and that Hobbes’s ostensibly proto-liberal concept of liberty resulted from a process of devaluing that very concept, suggesting a complicated and fraught relationship between Hobbes and liberal political theory.

Creator

• Day, Andrew

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-01y5-bt47

Subject

• History
• Philosophy
• Political science

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15763
• etdadmin_upload_845265

Keyword

• Liberty
• Religion
• Hobbes
• Theology
• Ecclesiology
• Hermeneutics

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright