For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, Horae Subsecivae. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by new statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors...

In this volume, ten leading scholars harvest the best of Western thinking on religious liberty. An opening chapter shows how religious liberty emerged slowly in the West through centuries of cruel experience and growing enlightenment. Separate chapters thereafter take up the unique roles of such titans as Marsilius, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, and the American framers in the Western drama of religious liberty. From widely divergent experiences, these titans discovered the cardinal principles of religious liberty--religious pluralism and toleration, religious...