HAWKE, Michael.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Right of Dominion, and Property of Liberty, whether Natural, Civil, or Religious. Rare first edition of this important work of political philosophy, the inheritor of ideas expressed in De cure ac belli et ac paci of Grotius (first published in English, 1654) and of Hobbes's Leviathan and De cive (both published in English in 1651).The dedication to Oliver Cromwell ("Magno, Magne Britannie Principi &c. Protectori, Patri Patriae, & semper Augusto") is signed "Mich. Hawk", and he is named on the title page as "M.H. Master in Arts, and of the Middle Temple". Little is known of Hawke and it is not clear where he obtained his Master of Arts (apparently not at Oxford or Cambridge), nor does his name appear in the Register of Admissions to the Middle Temple. He published two other works: The Grounds of the Lawes of England (1657), also dedicated to Cromwell, and Killing is Murder, and no Murder (1657), a justification of regicide.In his "massively learned, eclectic and avowedly Hobbesian" treatise (Armitage, p. 195), Hawke was arguing for legitimate despotism, citing "Hobbes in favour of very un-Hobbesian position, in support of Grotius that there is an obligatory law of nature in the state of nature and it should be kept. True natural liberty, argues Hawke, can only be found by living in accordance of the state" (Parkin, p. 144). "Hawke's providentialist imperialism may be one of the strangest progeny of Leviathan, but it was unique only in the Hobbesian means by which it approp

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