PRIVACY Seminar: Anticlerical Legacies at PRIVACY

In this talk, Dr Elad Carmel (Jyväskylä) will discuss his new book Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670–1740 (Manchester University Press 2024).

Anticlerical Legacies studies the radical appropriation of Hobbes’s ideas in England until the mid-eighteenth century. It offers a comprehensive account of the political and religious thought of Hobbes’s unlikely—yet most sympathetic—followers, including Whigs, deists, and freethinkers such as John Toland and Anthony Collins.

As the book suggests, for all these writers, anticlericalism was an essential component of a thorough Enlightenment project, aimed to achieve long-lasting civil peace. The talk will analyse the various strategies that this vision entailed—and what kind of privacy it helped to conceptualise.