Interview with Elad Carmel on Anticlerical legacies: The deistic reception of Thomas Hobbes

Elad Carmel (University of Jyväskylä) has recently published Anticlerical legacies. The deistic reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670-1740 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 248 pp.

We invited Elad to share insights into the book’s inception and the arguments he develops within it for our Book Series. He kindly agreed, and here is the result.

Jerónimo Rilla: Elad, your book offers a groundbreaking exploration of the reception of Hobbes's ideas among English deists and freethinkers. It’s a fascinating window into how Hobbes’s intellectual legacy evolved in a context often overshadowed by his more famous contributions to political theory.

Could you tell us what first drew you to this subject and how you decided to focus on the reception of Hobbes’s religious ideas?

Elad Carmel: Thank you, Jerónimo, for the kind words and the thoughtful engagement, and for the opportunity to discuss the book with you.

The first thing that drew me to these writers was the way in which their critique, especially in religious matters, is punchy, humorous even, and at the same time so insightful and, to a large extent, still relevant today. The more I read (and enjoyed) the works of Hobbes, Blount, Toland, Tindal, Collins, and others, the clearer it became to me that their projects shared some deep similarities, in what they were trying to achieve and in how they went about achieving it, particularly when it comes to their unique, nuanced sort of anticlericalism. And while scholars have alluded briefly to these connections previously, it seemed to me that we needed a more thorough understanding of what exactly the intellectual relationship between these thinkers consisted of. Was Hobbes some kind of a proto-deist? Were the deistic critiques Hobbesian in some profound and distinctive ways? Now, these questions are sometimes hard to answer, not least because labels such as ‘Hobbism’ or ‘deism’ were heavily charged. Turning to the study of reception allows us to capture these developments, I think, in fruitful and compelling ways. Moreover, specifically with Hobbes’s religious ideas, the angle of reception also adds something fresh to the existing, long-lasting debates about what Hobbes was, or was trying to do, when he wrote about religion. It seems to me that after decades (or centuries) of debates on Hobbes’s innovative—and at times perhaps odd—take on Christianity, the one thing we can all agree on is that it evidently allowed for a plurality of interpretations and adaptations, which is an interesting story to tell in itself. And, while it is absolutely true, as you say, that Hobbes’s famous contributions are to political theory, I do think that his religious ideas are inherently political, and tracing their multiple afterlives might even reveal something new about his politics and about the possible futures of his political thought.

JR: Perhaps a good way to immerse us in the book is by focusing on Edmund Waller’s characterization of Hobbes as the master of the art of ‘pulling down all the churches,’ which you discuss in the Introduction. This architectonic metaphor is interesting because it suggests that, parallel to the construction of what Hobbes is best known for—i.e., political order, the great Leviathan—there is some demolishing to be done. Why are these first deists so attracted to the pars destruens of Hobbes's project?

EC: This is a great question, because it touches on a core theme of the deistic project and its connection to Hobbes’s project. As you say, Hobbes is well-known for the structures he aimed to take down as well as those he suggested to put in place, but the deists are much better-known for their notably and often scandalously critical views. John Toland, for instance, was similarly described by contemporaries as someone who ‘made it his Business to pull down than to build; rather to find out and expose the Inconsistencies of the present Systems of Religion, than to make his own known’ (cited on p. 73 of my book). At the same time, this analysis, which is still quite prevalent in the literature, does not do full justice to the nuances—and the more positive elements—of the thought of these writers. To be sure, I do think that the negative elements, as it were, were what connected many of them: after all, the book focuses on what I call anticlerical ideas and legacies. The starting point of the deists—and their strongest link to Hobbes—was most definitely their uncompromising opposition to the clerical establishment and its political aspirations, and their main motive was a passionate hatred of what Hobbes called ‘unpleasing priests’ and what the deists called ‘priestcraft’. Yet, driven by this radical kind of anticlericalism, these writers offered a range of philosophical and theological innovations (for example, by formulating their versions of natural religion) as well as different political visions—what I suggest we see as anticlerical political thought—even if they were not always fully fleshed out. What is more, while Hobbes did of course prescribe a very distinct recipe for the Hobbesian society, still in religious matters his theory allowed for a range of arrangements which he did not fully explicate. At the risk of oversimplifying, we can say that his theory paves the way to some kind of a combination of civil religion and religious toleration, so long as the church is fully controlled by the civil sovereign, and in this sense he and the deists were in fact similarly and open-endedly constructive rather than destructive.

JR: Your book identifies distinct waves in the reception of Hobbes’s religious ideas among deists and freethinkers. What do you think accounts for these periods of resurgence and waning interest? Are there specific social, political, or intellectual conditions that shaped the varying intensity of engagement with Hobbes?

EC: Yes, absolutely. The book tries to trace a twofold line of developments: the reception of Hobbes in the decades that immediately followed his lifetime, and the emergence and peak of English deism and freethinking. There were some evident intersections between them, partly because the backlash against Hobbes—and what became known mostly pejoratively as Hobbism—was often tied to the anxieties about the rise and success of deism. And this was a rather dialectical process, in the sense that the critics often blamed the so-called deists for being the successors of the arch-heretic Hobbes (as well as others such as Spinoza and Locke), which then forced them to engage with Hobbes in their own creative ways. Subsequently, certain things that were borrowed from Hobbes started taking a life of their own: take, for example, the phrase ‘when reason is against a man, a man will be against reason’, which was used time and again by anticlerical writers during the whole period which the book covers. And then, of course, there were contextual factors in the background which also explain some of these waves of reception: the main dividing line between the first and second chapters, for instance, is related to the lapse of the Licensing Act, which meant that such radical critiques could now be made more conveniently public and explicit: this is when we find both the deist controversy of the mid-1690s and a significant rise of references to Hobbes and specifically discussions of his religious thought and impact.

JR: Studying Hobbes’s reception among the deists sheds light not only on their intellectual agendas but also, potentially, on Hobbes's own political and religious philosophy. What do you think this reception history clarifies about Hobbes himself?

EC: This is an important point, and a methodological one, namely, the relationship between a theory and its reception: what, and to what extent, can we say about a writer’s thought in light of its (sometimes varied) reception? And in this case, does it matter whether the deists got Hobbes right? I think they did, in the sense that they fulfilled his most radical potential: they took some of his ideas and methods—for instance, those that were meant to expose and dismantle the ‘kingdom of darkness’, or his art of ‘pulling down the churches’ which we discussed earlier—and developed them further, often much more openly and boldly than Hobbes did. Certainly, there are hints that this is what Hobbes would have done had he been able to write more freely, and indeed some later radicals argued precisely that, as I show in the closing chapters of the book. But this is ultimately speculative. I think that what this reception tells us about Hobbes’s philosophy with more certainty is that it had this radical potential, both politically and religiously, which is often overshadowed by the less radical parts of his theory. Relatedly, I would suggest that we look further into the work that anticlericalism does in his philosophy, and how central it is to his entire project. A possible implication, for example, can be that we should understand even the more infamous parts of his political philosophy, such as the right of censorship of the sovereign, which sometimes serves to disqualify Hobbes as an enlightenment figure, not so much as an attempt to mould the thoughts of the subjects, but as another, albeit extreme, measure to prevent clergymen from preaching so-called seditious doctrines. Interestingly, this is something that even a tolerationist like Matthew Tindal—with all his attempt to distinguish himself from Hobbes—would support as well. So, this reception helps highlight or reconsider elements of Hobbes’s thought that can be otherwise missed or neglected. What is more, it can send us to examine some of his other works, for example his later writings on heresy, which we know had an impact on his contemporary radicals, and where he sounds much more like a freethinker in his own right, as a more substantial part of his philosophy than previously appreciated.

JR: One of the fascinating aspects of your study is the variety of textual genres—pamphlets, tracts, essays, and vindications—that were central to deist and freethinker debates. What role do you think these formats played in shaping the arguments and their reception? Did the choice of genre affect how these debates engaged with Hobbes’s ideas or how they resonated with contemporary readers?

EC: Thank you! Yes, it was important for me to show that this kind of reception was not limited to purely philosophical works, not even only to published works. This serves two main goals: to show how thoroughly these writers engaged with Hobbes but also how multifaceted they were themselves. So, for example, we have biting satires by Charles Blount—arguably the most diligent student of Hobbes—or private correspondence where Anthony Collins reveals exactly which Hobbesian passages he was relying on—and, even more remarkably, why he thought Anglicans like Samuel Clarke did not read Hobbes properly. Equally important in this context were the various responses of the Anglican critics, which often made sure to keep these debates going, as did the Boyle Lectures of the 1690s and 1700s, for instance.

Finally, let’s take for example the unpublished works of James Boevey, which I discuss in Chapter 1, and who is not one of those writers often associated with deism (or indeed studied at all, with the exception of Mark Knights’s fantastic work). Boevey, who was a merchant and lawyer, wrote clandestine tracts on so-called active philosophy, but also on deism. In 1694, he wrote approvingly that ‘There are many Deists in all Parts of the World’ who ‘refuse to believe Priests cheats’: this is fascinating because testimonies of self-identified deists at this time were extremely rare, and here the fact that this was a private manuscript certainly played an important role. What is more, not only did Boevey engage with Hobbes but he also did it in a way that clearly shows that he read him carefully, for example, by referring to Hobbes’s notion of God as a corporeal spirit (cited on pp. 55–6 of my book). Later Hobbes’s materialism and determinism would be developed by writers like Toland and Collins and refuted by Clarke and others; thus, uncovering the various genres, texts, and writers over a significant span of time helps to tell the full story of the evolving and multilayered legacies of Hobbes and his anticlerical successors.

JR: This is excellent. Thanks a lot, Elad. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the legacies of your own book!

EC: Many thanks, Jerónimo, it has been a pleasure!