These two new titles in Cambridge University Press's Ideas in Context series display the virtues that one has come to expect from that series. Both are well-conceived studies of intellectual history, and both offer a wealth of raw material that calls out for rumination and digestion by political theorists.

The center of gravity around which a substantial body of work in the field of political thought and intellectual history continues to revolve is the thought of Thomas Hobbes. One might wonder, what new can be said about Hobbes and his context? Jon Parkin's Taming the Leviathan leaves to one side the debates about how Hobbes departed from his predecessors, and instead follows the career of his writings after they were written. He studies the reception of Hobbes's political and religious works in England from the time before Leviathan was written through the end of the seventeenth century, and he concludes that Hobbes played a crucial role in setting Enlightenment thought on the path it took.

In introducing his book, Parkin puts forward a question not about Hobbes's thought but about his reputation; he wonders why that reputation changed so dramatically over the course of sixty years. In 1640, Hobbes had been a respected translator of ancient texts and a promising geometer and scientist. By 1700, his name had become synonymous with dangerous atheism, moral relativism, and a libertine lifestyle. How did Hobbes's ideas, in all their confusing and fascinating complexity, give way to the intellectually untrue but morally simpler phenomenon known as “Hobbism”? How did his name become a term of accusation? The question is interesting in its own right, but also insofar as it might suggest ways of thinking about the processes that shaped the reputations of other writers whose names have become adjectives and insults—Machiavelli and Marx certainly faced that fate, as have more recent writers.

Parkin tackles the question by bringing out the philosophical and political agendas of Hobbes's readers and showing how the local controversies in which they were engaged help to explain their uses and abuses of Hobbes's texts. He also reveals a certain contingency in the course that history took; he arranges his text chronologically instead of imposing a thematic structure on it, and in doing so, he accents the unpredictability of the eventual outcome. Though he moves quickly from one controversy to another, Parkin's narrative is wonderfully clear and engaging; debates that might seem obscure in other hands are explained with an impressive clarity, and the reader comes away with a good sense of the range of controversies in which Hobbes's words were employed.

Parkin's approach may at first seem to follow in the footsteps of those literary reception histories that contest the primacy of a canonical work by de-emphasizing its agency and focusing instead on the agency of the supposedly minor authors who received it. Parkin turns the passive process of being influenced by Hobbes into a more active process of appropriating or “taming” him. The actors in his narrative are not Hobbes but writers such as John Bramhall, Edward Hyde, Robert Filmer, James Harrington, Richard Cumberland, and a host of others; John Locke is the only major name to make the list. In explaining each of their interventions, Parkin points to both contextual influences and the contingent drift of events. If various particular moments had turned out differently, he suggests, Hobbes's reputation in 1700 would have been very different.

Interestingly, however, Parkin seems ultimately unsatisfied with explaining the development of Hobbes's reputation solely in terms of the contingent and contextual factors motivating his critics. At various points in his narrative, we find him wondering exactly what it was about Hobbes's texts that made them so attractive as rhetorical targets and weapons. He highlights several features of Hobbes's writings in an effort to explain their power: the fascinating complexity of argumentation (p. 101); the intentional indeterminacy of the arguments with regard to their contemporary political implications (pp. 86, 89, 101); and the gripping, almost irresistible metaphors with which Hobbes captured the dilemmas of epistemic uncertainty and political instability (pp. 94, 375, 413). In allowing his attention to be drawn from the other authors back to Hobbes's writings themselves, Parkin lets his gaze be turned, one might say, from the planets to the sun they orbit. His approach is historical but it does not reduce Hobbes to the role of just another pamphleteer; on the contrary, he concludes by confirming Hobbes's special status. The book's final sentence asserts that its research into Hobbes's critics and appropriators has ultimately served to reveal “the true scale of Hobbes's intellectual achievement” (p. 416).

Indeed, one of the book's primary theses is that the power of Hobbes's work was so singular as to compel even his most determined critics to incorporate something of his approach into their own. Samuel Mintz's classic work on Hobbes's reception, The Hunting of Leviathan (1962), had made this point to some extent, but Parkin wants to push the idea further, as can be seen in the way that his title, Taming the Leviathan, implicitly responds to Mintz's. In turning Hobbes's critics from hunters to tamers, Parkin suggests that a domesticated Hobbes lived on even in the work of the theorists who claimed to oppose him. Parkin does not say much about the implications of this point, but one might wonder whether his argument does not offer an implicit challenge to the stylized contrast sometimes drawn between Hobbesian or so-called liberal political thought and the republican thought of writers such as Harrington. If Harrington can be seen as Hobbes-tamed, then the whole republican-liberal divide would seem to stand in need of reappraisal.

Hobbes also makes a central, though brief, appearance in Rhodri Lewis's book on the “artificial language movement” of the seventeenth century. That book, Language, Mind and Nature, offers a fascinating, though at times unwieldy, account of a campaign that seems to have been important to the scientific community at the Royal Society and elsewhere. This was the campaign to create a wholly new language, one capable of directly representing one's order of thoughts and thus of making it possible for all humans to speak to one another about the nature of the world. The project was an anti-Hobbesian one because it was committed to the fundamentally Aristotelian view “that the human mind could accurately represent the order of the natural world” (p. 224, cf. pp. 10, 136–40). Rejecting Hobbes's idea that language was simply a set of signs that should be made consistent, the diverse set of authors engaged in this project regarded language as a window into the structure of human thoughts and into reality.

Lewis groups a whole range of different authors into a movement with a name that he acknowledges they would not have recognized (p. xii), but he argues that they were unified by their shared desire to carry out a project first suggested by Francis Bacon. Lewis describes Bacon's position as one that accepted the Aristotelian view of language and called for its reform “as a means of ensuring that the mind could accurately mirror, represent and transform the natural world to human advantage” (p. 21). If the artificial language campaign was in fact both Baconian and anti-Hobbesian, one interesting point to draw out of Lewis's book would be the fault line that it reveals between Hobbes and his one-time teacher about the nature of language and of science.

Lewis also brings out the theological significance of the artificial language movement: It promised to return humankind to the sort of universal language instituted by Adam and lost at the time of Babel. Indeed, Lewis argues that many of the writers who seized on Bacon's project with enthusiasm were motivated by a millennial zeal to prepare for the end by facilitating a philosophical language that would, by virtue of its link to nature, be universally understood (pp. 21–22, 141, 228). In fact, however, the project came to an end not with the second coming, but with Locke's judgment in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that the creators of artificial languages were fundamentally misguided, and that they had succeeded in doing nothing except making themselves look “ridiculous” (p. 222).

For the readers of this journal, one must acknowledge that Lewis's book is not especially political. He has other preoccupations, such as the degree to which the artificial language proponents were influenced by mysticism. Nevertheless, the artificial language project that Lewis brings to light might well be studied from a political perspective in the future, given the importance of the relation between philosophies of language and theories of politics. To fully appreciate what would be at stake in such a study for political philosophy, however, it might again be helpful to turn at least some attention from Hobbes's contemporaries to Hobbes's thought itself, for a crucial question in understanding the issue of language and politics would seem to be whether Hobbes was right when he wrote that there is “nothing in the world Universall but Names” (Leviathan [1651] 1996, 26).