ABSTRACT
When the seventeenth century opened, a theory of power that was involved with magic prevailed; at the end of the century an ideal of a social contract had emerged that was based on a pragmatic balance of forces within the realm. When James I occupied the throne of England, he was prepared to justify his tenure to the world. He enjoyed political theory as much as he did religious debate. The timeliness of Leviathan is emphasized in Hobbes's Introduction, where he equates concord in a commonwealth with health in a body, and sedition and civil war with sickness and death. Like most seventeenth-century theorists, Harrington found the early passages of the Bible deeply relevant to his purposes. Locke's plain, confident prose reasonings took the magic and metaphysics out of religion, just as they took the mystery out of the divine right of kings.
