Hobbes on Church and State

Join Zephyr for this evening salon with Alison McQueen (Stanford University, Political Science) on the role of religion in the thought of Thomas Hobbes.

The seventeenth-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is usually remembered as a defender of the absolute state.  However, he was also one of the most radical thinkers of church and state in early modern Europe.  This talk explores Hobbes’s attempt to solve what he took to be the central political problem of his age: how to secure peace in the face of violent disagreement about God, Scripture, and religious authority.  His answer was bold and unsettling.  Religious conflict, he argued, could be tamed only if the civil sovereign held final authority over doctrine and worship.  But Hobbes did not believe that such authority could be sustained by force alone.  Political order required persuasion.  By engaging Scripture and theology, Hobbes sought to engage believers on their own terms and to show them how they could be both obedient and faithful subjects.  We’ll discuss how these arguments landed with Hobbes’s contemporaries, as well as where they might remain relevant today.   

Dinner will be provided to all attendees.