Jeffrey Collins's clever and interesting book has a thought-provoking thesis: that Hobbes's decision to return to England soon after publishing Leviathan (1651) ‘represented not merely a personal decision but a consequential political gesture’. Though the philosopher was a monarchist, he came to understand the Revolution as ‘the culmination of the long Reformation struggle’ to ‘submit the universal church to the power of emerging modern states’. Besides the famous statement that ‘we are reduced to the independency of the primitive Christians’, the second half of Leviathan includes some coded criticisms of the English bishops and an apparent endorsement of congregationalist accounts of ordination. Contemporary readers studied these ideas with great attention; Hobbes had personal and intellectual links with the Commonwealth's more secular-minded supporters (who often praised this aspect of his thinking), while its opponents sometimes charged that its church settlement was Hobbesian. Collins usefully draws attention to the surprising fact that the leading Independents made a virtue of a high view of the civil magistrate's role in ordering a state-supported church establishment. He concludes that the philosopher's support for such arrangements led him beyond acceptance of a de facto power to positive enthusiasm for the new republic.

This is a fine piece of research that offers ingenious answers to well-chosen questions; one mark of the book's quality is that the numerous scholars who will disagree with it will draw on the materials it assembles. But is the thesis actually well-founded? It seems to this reviewer to have three weaknesses. One is that too much of its evidence is drawn from one or other of two suspect sources: the maverick young Student of Christ Church Henry Stubbe; and the disgraced Episcopalian clergy, especially the brilliant Herbert Thorndike. Stubbe was a crypto-Hobbesian who was trying to confect an alliance between his hero the philosopher and the Independent vice-chancellor John Owen, while the Episcopalians, oppressed by Cromwellian Triers and Ejectors, had motives for depicting this lay-dominated Church as manifesting godless Hobbism. Few laymen had anti-erastian beliefs; it followed that those who wanted a more clericalist order had an incentive to conflate the views of their opponents with those of an unpopular outsider. It is no surprise that Thorndike, the cleverest and most extreme of all the High Church clergy (too flamboyant in his anti-erastian rigour to gain preferment after 1660), was also the keenest to level this unlikely accusation. The second is a noticeable inconsistency. Though post-Restoration professions of royalist beliefs are treated as Hobbes's attempts to cover his tracks, post-Restoration railings against bishops are treated as expressions of a constant attitude. No allowance is made for the fact that Hobbes had by then convinced himself that ‘the bishops’ as a group aspired to burn him.

Lastly, Leviathan's criticisms of bishops were moderate and fairly inexplicit: in chapter xlvii (a chapter which is crucial to Collins's argument), he was careful to note that the bishops ‘but seemed to usurp’ an autonomous clerical power and that ‘they were thought to demand it by immediate right from God’ (my italics). Conversely, the endorsement of Independency was accompanied by the significant qualification ‘if it be without contention, and without measuring the doctrine of Christ, by our affection to the person of his minister’; it is unlikely that Hobbes believed that either of these conditions were fulfilled. Moreover, Hobbes gratuitously asserted that the deliverances of natural reason (as opposed to civil law) required public worship ‘in words and phrases, not sudden, nor light, nor plebeian; but beautiful, and well-composed’. Yet Hobbes had nothing to gain from this unfashionable stance: the new republic was run by Independents, while the exiled Charles ii was temporarily Presbyterian. It is not at all unlikely that Hobbes preferred an Independent republic to a Scots Presbyterian monarchy. But if he was sure that episcopacy was worse than the republican church settlement, then it is curious that he did not say so.