Leviathan and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms

The problems of the Stuart multiple monarchy provide an important context for Hobbes’s Leviathan. His fellow Royalists were divided over whether to use Scottish or Irish assistance in regaining Charles’s throne, and Hobbes’s work can be read as a qualified endorsement of his patrons’ Scottish invasion strategy, to which a caustic assault on clerical power was then added. But Leviathan was more than a factional position paper; it was a Utopian masterpiece designed to secure lasting peace. Leviathan proposed to end the structural differences between the three kingdoms and to curb the power of an overmighty British aristocracy.