On Elad Carmel: “Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670-1740 (3)”

Felix Waldmann

Fellow, Tutor, and Director of Studies, Corpus Christi College.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Carmel observes that the mature phase of English freethought and the final generation of English deism are unintelligible without Hobbes. If an earlier phase of scholarship had considered as Hobbes as politically incompatible with eighteenth-century freethinkers, Carmel notes that the writers of the 1710s to the 1730s appropriated precisely those aspects of Hobbes that could aid their campaign against ‘priestcraft’. The crux of both chapters is the consolidation of what Carmel calls the ‘age of freethinking’. During this period, disputes over the authority of revelation and the integrity of the Biblical text were conducted with more boldness than had been possible in the 1690s and early 1700s. Many of the principal figures sought to distinguish genuine Christianity or natural religion from the corrupt institutions that had accumulated around it; their principal enemy remained priestcraft. 

Anthony Collins occupies a pivotal place in Carmel’s account. Collins transformed freethinking from an implicit intellectual disposition into an explicit philosophical programme, in part via channelling Hobbes’s confidence in independent rational inquiry while simultaneously adapting it to a more expansive defence of intellectual liberty. Collins consistently argued that all claims to authority must be subjected to unrestricted examination; the legitimacy of revelation depended not upon ecclesiastical office but upon rational assessment, and this insistence on free enquiry directly undermined clerical monopoly over religious interpretation. Yet Carmel carefully distinguishes Collins from Hobbes. Collins did not simply reproduce Hobbesian doctrines; he selectively employed Hobbesian methods while rejecting elements of Hobbes’s political theory. 

These are themes familiar to readers of Jon Parkin’s Taming the Leviathan, which had suspended its narrative prior to the period surveyed here by Carmel. The creative appropriation of Hobbes, with the tentative distancing or prevarication characteristic of Hobbes’s earliest reception recurs here in the work of Collins; and it is perhaps unsurprising that Collins’s own proximity to Locke, personally and intellectually, shared some of these features, as Collins both publicly adopted Locke’s philosophy, theology or exegesis, while resolutely imprinting it with his own idiosyncratic excursuses.  

The treatment of Shaftesbury is similar. Carmel demonstrates numerous points of continuity between Shaftesbury’s work and Hobbesian anticlericalism. Although Shaftesbury rejected Hobbes’s anthropology and his absolutism, he nevertheless accepted many of Hobbes’s historical criticisms of organised religion. Priestcraft and enthusiasm remained dangerous social forces precisely because they corrupted natural morality and civic life. 

The chapters devote considerable attention to the Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, as a popularisation of Hobbesian anticlericalism. Trenchard and Gordon translated ideas previously confined to learned controversy into journalism directed at a wider political readership; their historical understanding of priestcraft drew extensively upon Hobbes’s analysis of how religious institutions manipulated fear and superstition for political gain.

One of Carmel’s strongest contributions lies in showing that Hobbes’s influence extended beyond isolated philosophical borrowing to encompass these histories. Throughout these chapters, anticlerical writers repeatedly explain religious history through recurring patterns of clerical corruption institutional self-interest; Christianity itself is distinguished from the historical church, whose accumulated traditions are portrayed as political constructions rather than divine institutions – all redolent of a Hobbesian stance.

Chapter 4 shifts attention to the final generation of English deism after the appearance of Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation. Carmel presents this period not as the decline of deism but as its intellectual culmination. The debates become increasingly sophisticated as writers such as Tindal, Collins, Thomas Morgan and Alberto Radicati refined arguments concerning natural religion and ecclesiastical authority.

Carmel’s treatment of Radicati is particularly welcome. Radicati’s work has stagnated in Anglophone historiography since Franco Venturi’s brief discussion in Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1970); Venturi’s earlier monograph, Saggi Sull'Europa Illuminista. I. Alberto Radicati di Passerano (1954), had revealed the remarkable synthesis of post-Hobbesian anti-clericalism and the anti-papal characteristic of jurisdictional argument in Settecento Italy in Radicati’s Discours moraux, historiques et politiques (c.1729-36). Carmel presents Radicati as an instance of an unabashed of freethinking that followed in the wake of Collins – whose influence was evidently felt by Radicati during his sojourns in London (1726-34) and The Hague (1735 until his death). The inclusion of Radicati opened a possibility that Carmel understandably could not pursue (given the constraints of his nominal focus on England and the challenge of practicably accommodating it), which is to examine whether these incidents of Hobbes’s reception in England in this era were reflected in other contexts. A fuller study of Hobbes’s European reception remains a desideratum; Radicati, in particular, represents an intriguing instance of where Hobbes’s genial reception in an eighteenth-century Catholic context is apparent.

This discussion might also complement an important feature of Chapter 4, which is Carmel’s sustained discussion of orthodox responses to Hobbes’s epigoni. Clerical opponents consistently portrayed contemporary deists as disciples of Hobbes regardless of their considerable differences. Although critics frequently exaggerated Hobbes’s influence, they nevertheless recognised genuine continuities linking Hobbes to subsequent anticlerical traditions. One parallel here is to what degree Catholic orthodox critics adopted a similar tendency, or whether Hobbes’s presence was too muted or his claims too obscure to be employed as an effective cudgel at this point in his eighteenth-century reception.

In this respect, an expanded geography for Hobbes’s reception would accentuate the risk Carmel occasionally runs of presenting Hobbes as the dominant explanatory framework for developments that also owed much to alternatives – Spinoza, Locke, republicanism. A restricted emphasis on Hobbes could diminish the eclectic intellectual environment within which English freethinking developed, or the commingling of dangerous influences that critics of freethinking in England and abroad tended to associate with it. Yet this is a risk that haunts any reception history like Carmel’s: the success of his volume lies in how frequently it refuses to reduce each thinker to a cipher for Hobbes. If anything, the preparedness of an eighteenth-century to embrace Hobbes was inversely proportioned to their inclination to parrot his ideas derivatively; Hobbes’s admirers were inevitably sui generis.