HOBBES, Thomas - CLARENDON, Edward Hyde, Earl of.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes's Book, Entitled Leviathan. First edition, large and thick paper copy, handsomely bound in contemporary English black morocco, and with the near-contemporary bookplate to the front pastedown of John Evans as Bishop of Bangor. Clarendon's fiercely critical Survey is the most significant and sustained early response to Hobbes's Leviathan.Clarendon (1609-1674) was chief advisor to Charles I during the Civil War and Lord Chancellor to Charles II from the Restoration to 1667. He knew Hobbes from their days at court. Clarendon's view of government was very conservative, in the tradition of Tudor and Stuart paternalism; though not explicitly mentioning the divine right of kings, he draws on its tenets. He rejects Hobbes on two grounds - that government did not in any time or place evolve in the manner Hobbes outlines and that even if Hobbes's theories were right, a government constructed upon such absolutist principles could not work. In Clarendon's view, Leviathan consequently posed a real threat to civil peace."Clarendon's reply is an important document in terms of seventeenth-century political thought... Political theory must, after all, be judged as well in terms of political reality. Perhaps more than any other man in Restoration England, Clarendon was qualified to make such a critique" (Miller, p. 105). The work was completed in the early 1670s and published following his death -

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