On Elad Carmel: “Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670–1740” (1)

This online colloquium is dedicated to discussing Elad Carmel's book, "Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670–1740". The discussion will start with an introduction to the text by the author, followed by responses from Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel, Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq, and Felix Waldmann. Finally, Elad Carmel will provide a reply. We would like to express our gratitude to Manchester University Press for their support in organizing this colloquium.

Elad Carmel, Postdoctoral Researcher University of Jyväskylä

I am delighted and humbled to introduce this International Hobbes Society colloquium on my book—the first to be held under the Society’s new name. I am especially grateful for the opportunity to revisit some of the book’s ideas two years after its publication and shortly after the appearance of the paperback edition. In the discussion here, I am pleased to follow the lead of the discussants—Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel, Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq, and Felix Waldmann—for whose careful attention and insights I am deeply grateful.

The book offers a close look at the reception of Hobbes’s anticlerical thought—taken here as a broad philosophical and political worldview, including the critical historical, theological, and philological work undertaken by Hobbes and carried forward in various ways by writers from Charles Blount and Albertus Warren in the 1670–80s to Thomas Morgan and Alberto Radicati in the 1730s. It is organised chronologically to reflect the construction and development of these anticlerical and, to some extent, heterodox ideas and identities. In doing so, it delves into the nuanced thought of each of these writers, revealing the ways in which their common enterprise—their fight not merely against priests but against the kind of tyranny they identified as ‘priestcraft’—formed a distinctive enlightenment project, one meant not just to deconstruct but also to achieve lasting civil peace.

The method I employ in the book can be termed Parkinian (and to some extent Skinnerian), referring, of course, to Jon Parkin’s Taming the Leviathan (2007), in the sense of looking for explicit debts: places where the deists and freethinkers invoked Hobbes’s name or authority, relied openly on his thought, or engaged with Hobbesian ideas—sometimes critically, but always explicitly. One of my great satisfactions was that this approach—which looks at reception in a narrow, clear sense—proved more than sufficient to show beyond any doubt that a great number of deists and freethinkers were, to one degree or another, Hobbesian. Moreover, taking this approach was also helpful in understanding labels such as deism and freethinking, because many of these labels, like Hobbism, underwent complex and arguably dialectical processes of appropriation and reappropriation—indeed, a central part of reception, not only of ideas but also of terms. All of this, I argue in the book, is illuminating in showing us what these political and philosophical actors—eclectic and sophisticated writers such as John Toland and Anthony Collins, but also lesser-known figures—understood themselves to be doing. This becomes even more interesting when we take into account the fact that it was their later reception—in the form of insults, censorship, or even erasure—that made them inaccessible or uninteresting to much modern scholarship (with some very important exceptions, especially from the 2000s). The question of the extent to which scholarship itself constitutes a form of reception adds yet another layer to the story, though that is a topic for another time.

I recently discussed the book with Jerónimo Rilla on this website, and I think that interview captures the principal aims and themes of the project very well. Here, then, I would just like to highlight a couple of implications that emerged from the book and that I have been pursuing since it came out.

First, the methodological role of reception. Having been fully converted to this approach (and humbly seeking to convert others), and having seen how useful it proved in the case of Hobbes and the deists, I have become interested more broadly in reception as a field of study with enormous potential for the history of political thought and beyond. Indeed, perhaps especially beyond, because one of the things reception can help us do is foster collaborations among scholars of history, philosophy, literature, linguistics, theology, and the list goes on. My methodological interest in this area stems in part from the fact that, while writing the book and presenting its arguments, I became increasingly aware of a striking gap: on the one hand, reception appears to be central to a vast body of scholarship; on the other, much discussion—especially across disciplinary boundaries—is still needed about what exactly we do when we investigate reception, and how we do it. One especially valuable outcome of these reflections has been a workshop that I organised last February together with Rosario López at the University of Málaga, Reading the Readers: Theories, Methods, and Futures in Reception Studies, which will hopefully serve as the foundation for a new research network (if anyone reading this would like to be involved, please do get in touch).

Second, tracing reception is an invaluable tool for recovering overlooked or marginalised writers—examining who they engaged with, and who engaged with them, how, and for which purposes—which is one of the crucial tasks of intellectual history today (a point I made recently, together with Martina Reuter, in the case of Wollstonecraft’s reception). Back to the deists and their afterlives: what especially interests me moving forward is how these figures, and indeed their successors—the best-known of whom is the notorious Thomas Paine—were themselves received (or not) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in and beyond Britain (the conclusion of the book offers some preliminary directions). There, the paradox that accompanied them in their lifetimes very much persisted: they were too radical to ignore, but also too radical to embrace—and yet, within just a few decades, they started to seem not radical enough. Their ideas were nevertheless pervasive, while new forms of dissent supported emerging causes such as feminism, abolitionism, socialism, and, of course, secularism. To be sure, the debts to their thought may have become less explicit; but this, in turn, simply raises a further, albeit welcome, methodological challenge.