Hobbes and the Treason of the Intellectuals

Machiavelli hoped to make social conflict the power of his new order but Hobbes said his condemnation of social conflict in his master work Leviathan was occasioned by the disorders of the time, when men fought because they “call not only for peace but also for truth”. When it appeared in England in 1651, the country had been through the miseries of a civil war, and the English Parliament, and its supporters, had broken free from their customary place and constitutional role to challenge the monarch for sovereignty. The King's reluctant concessions to his subjects had merely encouraged their rebellion, and the gentry's Parliament, having defeated their sovereign by force of arms, held him prisoner and tried him for treason to the state before they condemned him to death. The new republican régime had then been torn asunder by internal quarrels and kept in turbulence by the visions of religious enthusiasts and a politicised army. Oliver Cromwell had entrenched his power, and England in 1651 was moving towards military rule.