Abstract This article revisits Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996) while also shining a light on Hobbes’s stated educational ambitions in Leviathan . It situates those ambitions within the wider politics of educational reform in revolutionary England while highlighting the importance of virtuous teachers to Hobbes’s claim that a limited focus on reforming higher education might bring about wider social and political transformation. It then compares Hobbes’s peculiar vision of virtuous teaching to John Milton’s. It concludes by suggesting that both Hobbes and Milton might have learned a thing or two from Skinner about how to inspire the young to follow one’s example.
Abstract Hobbes uses the most powerful tools of rhetoric to undercut the republican understanding of freedom and the associated ideal of the citizen as a free man. His claim that the greatest freedom of subjects lies in the silence of the law plays a key role in this attack. For all is polemical vigour, Hobbes’s notion of freedom as the silence of the law has, however, received scant attention in the scholarly literature. While discussions of Hobbesian freedom refer to the notion often, it is rarely examined in any detail. This article offers an extended examination of this freedom, which critically engages and ultimately rejects its common reading as a mere extension of freedom as non-interference and/or as a mere remnant of our natural freedom as non-obligation.
