This article examines the character of straw men as deployed by political and moral philosophers, using the example of politically motivated responses to the work of Thomas Hobbes. It attempts to give an Oakeshottian account of what is distinctive about the form of straw arguments within political philosophy before going on to identify some examples drawn from the reception of Hobbes' work. In the final section, discussion of the function of straw men points to their emancipatory role in the process of developing political theory. The article closes by drawing attention to the under-appreciated role that straw men play within the tradition of Western political thought, and the implications of this thought for our understanding of continuity within that tradition.

Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged as the most important political philosopher to have written in English. Originally published in 2007, Taming the Leviathan is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Hobbes's ideas. In the first book-length treatment of the topic for over forty years, Jon Parkin follows the fate of Hobbes's texts (particularly Leviathan) and the development of his controversial reputation during the seventeenth century, revealing the stakes in the critical discussion of the philosopher and his ideas. Revising the traditional view that Hobbes was simply rejected by his contemporaries, Parkin demonstrates that Hobbes's work was too useful for them to ignore, but too radical to leave unchallenged. His texts therefore had to be controlled, their lessons absorbed and their author discredited. In other words the Leviathan had to be tamed. Taming the Leviathan significantly revised our understanding of the role of Hobbes and Hobbism in seventeenth-century England.

Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker have both been regarded as isolated and eccentric disciples of Thomas Hobbes. However, a detailed examination of their views reveals a more complicated relationship with the notorious philosopher. Far from being simple ‘Hobbists’, Scargill and Parker developed ideas close to those of ‘latitudinarian’ clergymen. In the polarizing political circumstances of the later 1660s, the hostile identification of their views with the doctrines of the Leviathan led to public discussion of latitudinarianism and its relationship to Hobbism. In response, writers with latitudinarian sympathies used criticism of Hobbes as a means of reconsidering and redefining their own position. Such criticism accepted some of Hobbes's political conclusions, while at the same time rejecting his controversial methodology. Discussion of Hobbism and criticism of Hobbes were thus important means by which Hobbes's political insights were absorbed by Restoration political thinkers.

Hobbes gives only ambiguous hints about the future of religion under a Hobbesian scheme. The chapter argues that consideration of that ambiguity might tell us something important about the nature of Hobbes’s intervention in debates over religion. Far from being committed (overtly or covertly) to particular ecclesiological options, Hobbes sought instead to make his basic ideas available to a range of religious readers. Those readers were thus invited to interpret their doctrines in accordance with Hobbesian principles. Evidence from Hobbes’s reception suggests that his readers did accept this invitation, leading to a range of possible Hobbesian ‘futures’. The fact that commentators have been able to identify so many different modes of Hobbesian religion may in fact capture a crucial feature of his project, but perhaps not in the way that many of them have previously thought.

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