ABSTRACT
Catholic religion in a Protestant country while affirming their allegiance to the temporal sovereign.
Why study them then? I believe that if we want to understand why certain people, groups, movements, intellectual theories stood the test of time, we need to know the context in which they were born and the intellectual antagonists with whom they were in conversation. A specific example of this is Thomas Hobbes, a ‘modern’ and ‘classical’ author on all accounts, whose political theory cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration the context in which he elaborated it. Thomas White and his associates, as I seek to demonstrate in the following pages, were pivotal protagonists of that context. In other words, modernity is not an orphan, and if we want to understand it we need to look at its family history.
