When George Lawson's library was auctioned in 1681, it was clear that his reputation as a scholar, theologian, and writer on politics was substantial. Richard Baxter, perhaps the most prolific and influential seventeenth-century nonconformist, regarded him as a major influence in his own intellectual development, and his political ideas were being popularized by John Humfrey. Lawson's prominence survived into the early years of the eighteenth century, sufficient at least for one anonymous satire, The Prerogative of the Breaches (1702), to make familiar allusion to him in ridiculing female pretensions to political rule. At one point it is related how some unemployed poets subdue their landlady with moral lessons on sovereignty taken from Lawson. Nowadays, Lawson is known principally as a significant early critic of Thomas Hobbes, as a possible influence on John Locke, whose own huge library contained all of Lawson's published works, and as a sophisticated political philosopher.

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