Abstract

In addition to an account of that most irascible, dogmatic, and revolutionary philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, a primary objective of this dissertation was to explore the climate of opinion during the first seventy years of seventeenth-century England, as expressed by the scholars and writers who sounded that consensus, not only in direct response to the disturbing doctrines of Hobbes, but indirectly reflected the defense of traditional ideas and institutions, together with the hopeful acceptance of change in matters religious and political in a period of tumult and turmoil. ;The Hobbesian philosophy, portending the future in its materialism, yet aberrational in its acknowledgement of complete absolutism, excited responses from intellectuals--churchmen, politicians, schoolmen, and scientists, both at home and abroad, responses that supply us with an additional understanding of seventeenth-century thought. The bold and insensitive pronouncements of this complex genius were not only disturbing to his fellows but were to influence scholars and stimulate debate for centuries to come. ;The purpose of this dissertation, then, is not only to study and reassess Hobbes, the most controversial figure of his century, but what is certainly more important in an historical sense, to learn more about the century in which he lived through the responses of his critics