This is an important, lucidly expressed, and impressively researched book. The main subject—upon which it says much that is original and interesting—is Hobbes's ideas concerning rhetoric and philosophy, and the extent to which they changed in the course of his career. Hobbes was an excellent writer, manifestly skilled in the use of rhetoric, a topic upon which he nevertheless sometimes said some very disparaging things. Eminent scholarly commentators on Hobbes, including Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, Victoria Kahn, Karl Schuhmann, Conal Condren, Lodi Nauta, and David Johnston have debated whether his thinking about rhetoric shifted dramatically in the course of his career. An influential theory proposes that in his early (and pre-scientific) years Hobbes had a high regard for rhetoric and more generally for humanistic learning but that after his discovery of geometry in 1630 he moved away from his earlier interests and toward a scientific method of establishing truth. In the first two versions of his political philosophy—The Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642, 1647)—so it is sometimes said, he firmly rejected rhetoric. But by the time he wrote Leviathan (published in 1651) he had come to embrace it again, and also to deploy it to telling effect in supporting his philosophical arguments.

Timothy Raylor takes issue with this argument. He contends that Hobbes's attitudes toward rhetoric did not change in any major way in the course of his career. Hobbes, Raylor argues, never did adopt a Ciceronian civic humanism that saw rhetoric as a morally uplifting activity, needed to promote truth and the public good. On rhetoric, the argument proceeds, Hobbes was and remained an Aristotelian, viewing rhetoric in pragmatic terms as a collection of rules on how to persuade. His style of humanism was not Ciceronian but Tacitist, as was that of Sir Francis Bacon, to whom Hobbes's employers the Cavendishes lent him as a secretarial assistant in the early 1620s. Like Bacon, Hobbes had a high regard for Thucydides, and for a while he was influenced by Baconian ideas about natural history. The completion in 1640 of The Elements of Law did not signal any change in Hobbes's views on rhetoric (the case continues), but it did involve a major restructuring of his thought on ethics and politics. For he now argued that they were not matters of mere opinion but were certain and scientifically provable, and he set out the proofs. He did not abandon this position later. True, in Leviathan he used rhetorical devices to great effect. But he had not abandoned them in the earlier books. The third and fourth parts of Leviathan do indeed feature many splendidly eloquent passages, but this does not show that Hobbes had come to regard rhetoric as the handmaiden of philosophy. For in those two parts (Raylor argues) he was concerned less with expounding or demonstrating his political theory than with satirically exposing the follies and vices of the Catholic Church and of clerics more generally.

Raylor draws on a wealth of sources including many manuscripts from Chatsworth and elsewhere. It provides detailed and original discussions of works by Hobbes that are rarely analyzed and virtually never considered for their philosophical or rhetorical implications. His translation of Thucydides receives thorough attention, as do his poem on the wonders of the Peak (De mirabilibus pecci, ca. 1627–1632), his Latin Digest of Aristotle's Rhetoric (ca. 1631–1634), and the English Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (1637). Raylor discusses many unknown or little-known details about the lives and thinking of Hobbes and his associates. We learn that one of Hobbes's predecessors as a tutor in the Cavendish household at Hardwick plotted unsuccessfully to help the royal princess Arbella Stuart escape from custody there and committed suicide shortly afterwards. It used to be said that Hobbes and his pupil Sir William Cavendish went on the grand tour of the European mainland in 1610. Then research suggested that we need to re-date that tour to 1614–15. Now Raylor has revived the tour of 1610, showing that Cavendish certainly went and that Hobbes is likely to have gone with him. Hobbes's authorship of the Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique has been questioned. In an appendix, Raylor provides convincing reasons for reasserting it, but does not claim that he has definitively demonstrated it. He reasonably suggests (but does not claim to have proved) that the essays in Horae subsecivae (1620) are by Cavendish, though three of them have sometimes been attributed to Hobbes.

The work also contains a great deal of interesting information about the history of attitudes toward rhetoric and philosophy. There are index entries on antitheses, demonstration, dialectic, dispositio (arrangement), eikota (probabilities, verisimiles), elocutio (style), endoxa, enthymeme, figuration, inventio, oratio, metaphor, and many similar topics on which the volume is most informative. Readers interested less in Hobbes than in early modern ideas about rhetoric and philosophy will find much that is instructive and entertaining in this book. People concerned with Hobbes's views on sovereignty, absolute power, the law of nature, natural rights, the state of nature, (non-)resistance, covenants, the Scottish Covenanters, or the politics of Pym and Cromwell will find relatively little here that is directly relevant, but they might take the opportunity to acquire information that will help them to discover how Hobbes's views on philosophy and rhetoric affected his treatment of such matters.

In summary, this is a fascinating and important book, which contains much material on Hobbes and his associates and on their ideas about rhetoric and philosophy, and which is certain to stimulate further debate.