On Elad Carmel: “Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670-1740 (4)
Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel
Full Professor and Director, Master's Program in Political Philosophy and Ethics, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez.
There is something almost polemical about the central claim of Elad Carmel's book, and that is precisely its strength. The argument, stated plainly, is that the English deists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were far more indebted to Thomas Hobbes than scholarship has been willing to acknowledge — and that this debt was not incidental, not a matter of shared atmosphere or loose intellectual kinship, but specific, textual, and often deliberately cultivated. This argument runs directly against one of the more durable narratives in the historiography of the early Enlightenment, and Carmel is clearly aware of the provocation he is issuing.
The most prominent target is Jonathan Israel's thesis that Spinoza — not Hobbes — was the philosophical engine of radical Enlightenment thought. On Israel's account, as Carmel reconstructs it, Hobbes disqualifies himself from that role on account of his anti-libertarian politics, his High Church connections and his support for rigorous political and intellectual censorship (p. 5). Carmel's response is not to deny the force of this reasoning as a logical matter, but to question its relevance as a historical one. Intellectual historians do not study what readers should have done with texts; they study what readers actually did. And what the deists actually did was to read Hobbes extensively, cite him approvingly, and draw on his arguments about priestcraft, biblical criticism, materialism and the subordination of the church to civil authority, in ways that are traceable in print and manuscript alike. That this borrowing required a degree of creative selectivity — taking what served their purposes and quietly setting aside what did not — is hardly a disqualification. It is, rather, a description of how reception always works. The conclusion presses the point from a different angle: where Israel defines the Radical Enlightenment by its refusal of any compromise with the past, Carmel observes that Hobbes and his anticlerical successors engaged with the past and with the sacred at length, and that the scrutiny of scriptural authorship and the analysis of religious history in terms of human interests were the very form that engagement took (p. 179).
This is a methodologically honest book. Carmel follows the framework established by Jon Parkin's Taming the Leviathan, privileging cases where there is definite textual evidence of direct engagement — explicit acknowledgement of a debt, or clear evidence that the ideas are in fact Hobbesian (p. 6). He is candid, too, that the criterion has a second and looser clause: unacknowledged borrowings and strong resemblances also count, provided there is good reason to believe that Hobbes was in the writer's mind (p. 6). And he concedes at the outset that Hobbes was more influential on some of these writers than on others, and that the nature of the influence was not the same in each case (p. 7).
The effect of this discipline is that the argument, when it concludes, carries genuine force. Blount's copy-book, compiled between 1681 and about 1684 and now in the library of the Athenaeum Club, is shown to be dense with extracts from Leviathan, Decameron physiologicum and the Considerations, each accompanied by Blount's own telegraphic annotations on priestly danger and vulgar superstition (pp. 41–43). Albertus Warren, arguing for the sufficiency of natural religion, reproduces Hobbes's formula about the two governments that make men see double almost word for word (p. 32); the attribution to Warren of 'Of Natural Religion, as Opposed to Divine Revelation' is offered with appropriate caution but is well supported (p. 40). And in May 1707, in a private letter to William Simpson, Baron of the Court of Exchequer, Anthony Collins takes Hobbes's side against Samuel Clarke without qualification, thanking Simpson for having consulted the texts on his behalf (p. 97). These are not gestures towards influence but demonstrations of it. The attention paid to James Boevey — a merchant-philosopher of Dutch descent whose deistic manuscripts remained unpublished and who has been recovered only recently by Mark Knights — serves the broader argument neatly: here is a writer who belonged to no particular intellectual milieu, though he was not wholly disconnected from the circles the book discusses, and who arrived nonetheless at positions recognisably shaped by Hobbes (pp. 54–55). That suggests a diffusion of Hobbesian ideas which went beyond any particular scribal network.
Whether all of the book's claims are equally earned is a separate question, and here I would put the matter as one about evidence rather than about quality. The chapters covering the earlier period are granular in the way just described. In the later chapters the evidential register shifts. The presence of Hobbes in the Independent Whig and Cato's Letters rests substantially on a single recurring tag — that when reason is against a man, a man will be against reason — together with a borrowed metaphor and the standing epithet of 'a great philosopher' (pp. 128–130, 133); and Carmel's own prose moves from demonstration to plausibility, suggesting that Trenchard and Gordon may well have been inspired by the kingdom of darkness (p. 128). By the fourth chapter this is explicit: Morgan does not cite Hobbes in The Moral Philosopher at all, and the connection is carried by prior familiarity and convergence of doctrine, which makes Hobbes's impact, in Carmel's phrase, highly likely (p. 163). Something similar governs the treatment of Tindal, where the recognition of the debt is judged probable but prudently unacknowledged (p. 156). None of this is illegitimate — the second clause of the method was declared in advance — but it does mean that the book's chronological arc carries a change in what is being shown, from documented borrowing to inferred absorption, and the reader is not always alerted to the transition.
There is also a question worth pressing about the analytical category that holds the book together. Carmel is alert to it: he treats deism and freethinking as contested labels which began as insults and were subsequently reclaimed, proposes that we understand them as a continuum of ideas sharing a family resemblance, or as a plurality of deisms, and reads the labels themselves as speech acts in the Skinnerian sense (pp. 8–10). The conclusion goes further, setting an 'anticlerical Enlightenment' alongside William Bulman's Anglican Enlightenment and describing the two as sides of a single coin, united by a shared preoccupation with civil peace (pp. 179–180). This is an attractive resolution, but it makes the discriminating power of the category harder rather than easier to secure. If Warburton and his freethinking enemies belong to the same Enlightenment, and if what they share is a concern with the political conditions of stability, then the question returns in a sharper form: at what point does demonstrating that a group of writers shared a Hobbesian anticlerical vocabulary amount to demonstrating something more than that Hobbes had supplied a very useful vocabulary for anticlericalism? The book is strongest when it shows not merely that the deists borrowed Hobbesian arguments but that they developed them — that Blount took the naturalisation of religion further than Hobbes had taken it, or that Toland radicalised the implications of Hobbes's biblical criticism in ways Hobbes had either not intended or not dared to state. Those moments are the book's most illuminating, and one wishes there were more of them.
The treatment of the orthodox critics is one of its more underappreciated contributions. The Boyle Lectures, the answers to Blount's Oracles of Reason, the persistent Anglican campaign to gather deism, Hobbism and atheism under a single polemical label — all of this is examined with care, and Carmel draws out the paradox that orthodoxy's attacks on the Hobbes-deist connection may have done as much to consolidate that connection as to destroy it. By repeatedly insisting that the deists were Hobbesians, the critics helped make Hobbesianism a readily available identity for writers who might otherwise have had to construct their genealogy more laboriously. The best evidence for this is furnished, delightfully, by Franklin, who reported that the books he encountered against deism made a thorough deist of him, since the arguments quoted for refutation struck him as stronger than the refutations (p. 181). There is something almost comic about the dynamic, and Carmel is not above allowing the reader to notice it.
The question of what Hobbes himself would have made of this reception is raised, and answered more boldly than one might expect. Following Parkin, Carmel holds that Hobbes committed himself to no particular ecclesiological model but supplied tools that readers could apply to their own circumstances, that his treatment of religion was open-ended in the sense that it allowed various readers to use it in their own ways, and that the deists may have been precisely the audience he had hoped for (pp. 12–13). This is a plausible and attractive account, and it is also the point at which the book is most exposed. If the open-endedness is a matter of design rather than of mere availability, then the specificity of the Hobbesian legacy becomes harder to fix, not easier: any sufficiently motivated anticlerical reader will find usable materials in Hobbes, and it becomes correspondingly difficult to say what would count as evidence that a given anticlerical argument was not Hobbesian. The book gestures towards an answer — the particular combination of anticlerical history, materialist theology and civil religion theory that Hobbes offered was distinctive — but the argument would benefit from sharper articulation.
These reservations aside, Anticlerical Legacies is a significant contribution to the history of political thought and to the historiography of the English Enlightenment. It challenges a well-established narrative with specific evidence rather than counter-assertion, and it restores to visibility a set of connections — between Hobbes and the deists, between manuscript and print culture, between theological controversy and political argument — that scholarship had been content to leave in shadow. It also, quietly but persistently, makes the case that the deists were more interesting as theorists than they are usually credited with being: not simply propagandists or popularisers, but serious participants in debates about religion, authority and civil peace that shaped the intellectual landscape of their century. That is a hard judgement to disagree with, and it gives the book its coherence and point.
Questions for the author
The method declared at the outset admits two kinds of evidence: acknowledged debts, and unacknowledged borrowings where there is good reason to think Hobbes was in mind (p. 6). Across the book's chronological arc the weight shifts from the first to the second — from Blount's annotated extracts to Morgan, who does not cite Hobbes at all in The Moral Philosopher (p. 163). Is that a change in the surviving evidence, or a change in the phenomenon itself: by the 1730s, had Hobbes ceased to be an author one cites and become a vocabulary one has absorbed? If the latter, that seems a thesis worth stating in its own right, and one that would give the last two chapters a different kind of force.
If Hobbes supplied tools rather than conclusions, and if the deists were the readers he had hoped for (pp. 12–13), what would count as evidence against a Hobbesian reading of a given anticlerical argument? Put differently: is there an eighteenth-century attack on priestcraft that the book's criteria would classify as not Hobbesian, and what does it look like?
The conclusion makes the anticlerical Enlightenment and Bulman's Anglican Enlightenment two sides of one coin, joined by the problem of civil peace (pp. 179–180). Does 'anticlerical' then remain the discriminating category, or is the real unit of analysis the civil-peace argument, within which Hobbes is one supplier among Erastus, Grotius, Selden and Spinoza? What is lost if we redescribe the book's cast as theorists of civil religion who happened to find Hobbes the handiest of these?