Cambridge school contextualism, dominant for the past forty years, can be credited for having revived many facets of early modern intellectual history. Among these, however, one would not necessarily number the history of textual reception. Classically, Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and their students have worked outward from a specific text, attempting to identify and describe the preexisting linguistic traditions that rendered it a meaningful “utterance.” By contrast, historians of reception typically invert these priorities by casting their attentions forward and by attending exclusively to the “public readings” of a specific text, irrespective of its original contextual situation. It is, of course, difficult to write intellectual history without some attention to reception, but the stand-alone “Reception of X” genre has not been in vogue for decades. (Historians, one might speculate, were partly wary of the postmodern overtones of the “reception theory” dominant among literary critics such as Stanley Fish.) There are signs, however, that the pure study of reception is making a comeback. Preeminent historians such as Noel Malcolm and Jonathan Israel have published in this mode. And now, for the first time, a classic study of reception has emerged from the belly of the beast itself, Cambridge's Ideas in Context series.

Jon Parkin's Taming the Leviathan is the first book-length treatment of Thomas Hobbes's reception to appear since Samuel Mintz's redoubtable The Hunting of Leviathan of 1962. Across those four decades, scholarship on Hobbes himself has been an industrial enterprise, and so an updated volume dedicated exclusively to his reception has been needed. Parkin's erudite and lucid book has now met that need.

Taming the Leviathan successfully assimilates many of the most important contributions of modern Hobbes scholarship, including a rejection of the “Olympian” Hobbes as isolated genius; a skepticism of Hobbes's notoriety as an atheist; an attention to the tumultuous political context in which he wrote; recognition of the superficiality of any royalist or monarchist reading of Hobbes; and, most crucially, a refusal to falsely secularize his “political theory.” In general, Parkin successfully synthesizes all of these recent perspectives. This makes his book far less reductive than its predecessors, which tended to privilege more isolated themes (reactions to Hobbes's absolutism or his materialism, for instance). To be sure, casting such a wide net causes some interpretive and stylistic difficulties. Parkin's book is a touch repetitive, and its line of argument occasionally meanders as it herds together disparate reactions to Hobbes. But these costs are a fair price for the sheer comprehensiveness of the volume. Parkin's analysis ranges widely over major philosophers such as Harrington and Locke, clerical writers of various persuasions, more obscure sermonizers and pamphleteers, and even poets and playwrights.

Parkin organizes his material chronologically. This choice entails some redundancy, but it captures the cumulative nature of the reception process, which is particularly important for a study of a political theorist writing during revolutionary upheavals. Parkin rightly emphasizes the importance of regime changes in buffeting the reputation of Thomas Hobbes. A chapter on the reception of Hobbes's writing before Leviathan is followed by two on Leviathan during the Interregnum, two on the Restoration context, one on the Exclusion Crisis, and one on the “long” Glorious Revolution (terminating in 1700). Political upheavals thus contour the study, and quite properly so. In each of these chapters, Parkin must keep a lot of balls aloft. He foregrounds those Hobbesian doctrines that were most open to contested readings: the constitutional implications of his absolutist contractualism, the political ambiguity of his theory of obligation, the ecclesiological resonance of his anticlericalism and Erastianism. Parkin does not unearth many new readers of Hobbes. Most of the texts and thinkers he discusses have been treated by previous historians, but his account is the first to canvass them all. His most original chapters deal with the latter periods of the Restoration, by which time “Hobbism” had become an ideological construct with wide currency. Hobbes's doctrines on obedience, sovereign power, and church authority seeded the stormy debates over monarchical and episcopal legitimacy that raged during the 1680s and 1690s.

Reception studies, particularly those organized chronologically, risk falling into the stylistic mode of the encyclopedic survey. Parkin's efforts to avoid this by organizing his source material under a strong, overarching argument are only partly successful. The claim that “Hobbes's work was often read against the backdrop of specific political and religious debates” is a truism. Parkin goes beyond this with the stronger claim that Hobbes's works were especially malleable because they were “politically and theologically underdetermined” by design, in order to “avoid identification with particular political and religious causes.” This thesis outstrips the evidence provided. Parkin's necessarily scattered source base almost inevitably conjures up a chameleon-like impression of Hobbes. But his book does not sufficiently exploit the very different sources—including Hobbes's more minor writings, his correspondence, Behemoth, and even Leviathan itself—that are required for political and intellectual biography. Most canonical thinkers (Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel) spawn multiple interpretive traditions. There is a frustrating circularity to Parkin's argument that the multifarious contemporary reactions to Hobbes accurately reflected the man's own supposedly apolitical trimming. Ironically, this reading tends to mimic the traditional interpretation of Hobbes as a solitary genius transcending his own time, an interpretation that Parkin ostensibly takes as his main foil. In any case, despite Parkin's claim that Hobbism was appropriated (positively or negatively) by all comers, Taming the Leviathan demonstrates that Hobbes was cast as an atheist and rebel with a marked consistency. Only rarely was he read as a Stuart loyalist or as a defender of the established church.

Parkin's more successful overarching thesis argues that criticism of Hobbes was often generated by thinkers who were inexorably influenced by him but were skittish of his heterodox reputation. Time and time again Parkin demonstrates this to have been the case. Across the seventeenth century, various species of contractualists, natural law theorists, and church Erastians clamored against Hobbes with far too much protesting. Much recent Hobbes scholarship has worked to excavate those largely underground streams that bore the influence of Hobbesian doctrines into the age of Enlightenment. Taming the Leviathan is a valuable contribution to that enterprise.