The impact and influence of Thomas Hobbes’ political thought on the English constitution debate in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is well understood. However, for Matthew Ward, one overlooked area of concern is the impact of Hobbes’ ideas on political thought in Ireland. Ward demonstrates that, far from being rejected, Hobbes’ natural law thesis became a widely used tool in the governance and administration of church politics within the Irish context. In the process, he makes a convincing case for seeing the application of Hobbes’s ideas in Ireland as being significant for the wider appreciation

For Micheal Brown, Ireland’s experience conforms to the reality of an ‘Irish Enlightenment’.Footnote ¹ A controversial statement – both now and in the period under consideration – the phrase can be seen to foreground many of the debates in Ward’s study. While not directly engaging in the debate about its existence, Ward’s examination of the application of the intellectual consequences of Hobbesian natural law, one that also has methodological implications for intellectual history. Hobbesian principles within an Irish context does suggest that he is willing to accept that a civic form of the ‘Irish Enlightenment’ did exist.

A second historiographical context for Ward’s work is the idea of ‘intellectual geography’ advanced by John Pocock.Footnote ² Within this context, Ward demonstrates the debt owed to his supervisor, Jon Parkin. Parkin’s own contribution to our understanding of Hobbes was to challenge the view that Hobbes’ conclusions made plain within the Leviathan were universally rejected. Consequently, as Parkin shows in his 2007 publication Taming the Leviathan, Hobbes’s conclusions were drawn on by his contemporaries and subsequent generation in order both to defend and criticise his ideas. As Ward shows, this also meant that different geographical contexts could use Hobbesian strategies differently.

Part of Ward’s argument throughout the book rests on his assertion that the authors who read and engaged with Hobbesian ideas ‘read with’ Hobbes. Through using this fundamental prepositional phrase, Ward implies that Hobbesian ideas informed the way these writers understood the domestic affairs of Ireland. This point has interesting ramifications for contemporary methodological debate. Through using this method, Ward reinforces his argument, and explores how via the process of tailoring, Hobbes’s ideas became domesticated to an Irish audience. Indeed, through this grammatical device, Ward is able to elucidate the way Hobbesian ideas informed these later debates. In the process, he is also able to show how a past political language can be used to reinforce contemporary convictions. Thus, part of Ward’s project is to explore how the reformulation of ideas is shaped by a uniting one distinct intellectual tradition with the political conditions of another through highlighting the intellectual process involved in drawing inspiration from the former to have an impact on the latter.

The formal structure of the book is composed of eight chapters centred upon three individuals and their engagement with the work of Hobbes: William Petty, John Vessey, and Edward Synge. This choice of opening is chronologically justified and reflects Ward’s historiographical preoccupation with tracing Hobbes’ immediate political legacy. This first chapter indicates the way that Ward envisages the idea of ‘thinking with Hobbes’, as an active process of thinking through the practical implication of Hobbesian arguments within the political context of Ireland. For Ted McCormick, Petty owed his intellectual allegiances not to Hobbes, but to Francis Bacon.Footnote ³ Contesting this narrative, Ward argues that such a depiction loses sight of the way Hobbes informed Petty’s immediate intellectual surroundings. Eschewing Petty’s economic legacy and the Foulcauldian tendency to read him as part of an emerging governmentality paradigm, Ward places Petty in a far more engaging narrative of the refashioning of post-Hobbesian thought towards a concept of political economy. Recognising this underappreciated point moreover challenges a long-standing argument made by István Hont that Hobbes was not interested in commerce and that Petty’s work ought not to be taken as channelling Hobbes’ conceptual contributions into economic explanation.Footnote ⁴ More importantly however, it positions Petty as being rooted solidly within the natural law tradition.

For Ward, the further point of evidence for Petty’s Hobbesian leanings stems from the fact that, in his economic writings, Petty drew on the work of Sir John Davis. Davis is an interesting natural law case study simply because of his own debt to the Spanish Scholastic, Fransico Suarez, arguing that the crown could impose levies over its domain. The theme of commercial strategy is further explored in the second chapter. Yet again challenging the thesis pursued by Hont, Ward makes the case for an economic reading of Hobbesian claims, revealing Petty’s sophisticated engagement with Hobbes attitude to questions of colonial governance. Doing so, Ward turns to examine Petty’s relationship with the CABAL government and how this was informed by his understanding of Hobbes. The chapter itself is divided into two parts, dealing firstly with the question of colonial governance and secondly questions of church politics in Ireland. The juxtaposition of these two topics in the same chapter may strike the reader as questionable, but Ward’s aim is to indicate the way in which Petty’s reading ‘with Hobbes’ gave rise to a type of thinking concerned with strategy and policy rationale. Ward’s contribution to the scholarship of Petty situates him in an institutional setting framed to a certain extent by the reaction to Hobbes. Thus, to think ‘with Hobbes’, as Ward’s thesis suggests, is to read Hobbes as presenting a set of policies with which to govern. This emphasis on practical guidance was also crucial for two clerics, Edward Vesey and John Synge.

Born in Armagh, but educated in England, John Vesey was from an Anglican clerical background and would go on to occupy the bishopric of Tuam. Vesey’s writings are significant for they incapsulate the way Anglican Royalist discourse drew upon Hobbesian arguments in order to defend the regime in Ireland both under James II and subsequently William and Mary. Such a formulation seems apt in relation to Ward’s emphasis on reading ‘with Hobbes’. For Ward, it is the way in which Vesey drew on Hobbes’s arguments in order to deal with the Irish question that is so crucial. In one sense, Ward’s aim is to repurpose Parkin’s ‘Taming thesis’ towards an emphasis on adapting Hobbes’ arguments to meet the needs of the church in Ireland. Indeed, within the discussion of Vesey’s sermons, there is a clear sense that Ward wants to attribute to Vesey the same method of revision of Hobbes’ arguments that were made by Richard Cumberland in his De Legibus Naturae, a move which has been substantially addressed by Parkin himself. Thus, Ward could be said to have reinforced the narrative of Hobbesian revisionism set up by Parkin in terms of demonstrating the way Hobbesian natural law was reconstructed to meet the needs of a new set of circumstances. Yet in making plain that the authors discussed read ‘with Hobbes’, Ward indicates a slightly more nuanced understanding of Hobbes’ reception.

This sense of complexity of reception is brought home in Ward’s final chapter on Edward Synge. Raised in an Anglican clerical family, Synge would go on to make a plea for religious pluralism in his 1725 sermon A Case for Toleration, a sermon based on the parable of the reluctant dinner guests, a story that ends with the angry host ordering others to be compelled to take the absentees’ places. Augustine cites the story as justification for the forced coercion of heretics, but Ward’s careful reconstruction of Synge’s argument understands Synge to be rejecting the Augustinian reading of compulsion and advancing a subtler understanding of the parable in line with Hobbes’ conviction that the state must remain above religious prejudice.

Concluding his study with this point, Ward returns to his fundamental historiographical premiss that to ‘read with’ an author is to actively engage with their ideas and to requisition and reconstruct them to meet new challenges, a point he clearly makes in the case of Thomas Hobbes.