SOURCE: "The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought," in The Historical Journal, Vol. IX, No. 3, 1966, pp. 286-317.

In the following excerpt, Skinner explores Hobbes's contemporary reputation and rejects the claim that he was isolated ideologically.

The modern reputation of Hobbes's Leviathan as a work 'incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory'¹ has concentrated so much attention on Hobbes's own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography² that Hobbes's 'extraordinary boldness'³ set him completely 'outside the main stream of English political thought' in his time.⁴ The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbes's political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone...