ABSTRACT
The long-running antagonism between Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes is one of the most important encounters of Hobbes's early reception. Although Hyde's formal critique of Hobbes, the Brief View and Survey of Leviathan, would only be published in 1670s, it represented the culmination of a dispute that stretched over thirty years. Hobbes had written The Elements at the request of William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, with a view to providing a short account of his political theory designed to demonstrate the powers and rights associated with sovereignty. Hobbes was forced to flee from Paris at the end of 1651 in circumstances that remain murky to this day. Hyde's account of Hobbes's flight from France in the Brief View and Survey makes Hobbes's actions the consequence of the local reception of Leviathan. Ultimately both men had a shared sense of the disastrous role that theoretical argument could play in political practice, but saw very different dangers arising from language involved.
