ABSTRACT
In the century that followed the death of Descartes, the European order underwent many violent changes. On the continent, the religious quarrel between Catholicism and Protestantism appeared no nearer solution, though Protestantism as a political force began slowly to gain the ascendancy. The problem for men was how to live, or to carry on social and international life, in a world thus racked and dislocated by religious passions: in short, the problem was one of toleration. Now an intellectual problem may well agitate a thousand or a million minds at the same time; but only among a few, a sensitive and cultivated minority, will there be an awareness of that problem’s true meaning. There were those who, aware of the new critical forces at work, shied at the prospect of a great and perhaps disastrous intellectual upheaval. Thomas Hobbes delivered a counter-attack against the new libertarianism in his book of political philosophy, The Leviathan.
