Chapter One. “Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy”

Hobbes claimed that he was the founder of political philosophy insofar as he claimed to be the first to raise political philosophy to the rank of a genuine science. This introduction sketches the reasons for taking Hobbes’s bold claim seriously and for exploring what he meant by it. Hobbes’s revolutionary project helped to lay the foundations for modern liberalism and modern secularism, the beleaguered states of which today provide an incentive to reexamine their roots. After discussing Hobbes’s relationship to liberalism and secularism, the introduction explains the need for an approach to Hobbes’s work that is broad and exploratory—one that considers not only his political philosophy, but also his critique of the classical tradition, his natural philosophy, and his critique of religion, and that focuses less on Hobbes’s historical context than on the complexities of his own arguments.

Context (archaeology) · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Liberalism · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Secularism · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought