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10 - Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2012

Quentin Skinner
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The opening months of 1649 saw the climax of the English revolution: the king was executed, the monarchy and House of Lords abolished, the Commonwealth of England proclaimed. But this outcome was far more radical than most moderates in the presbyterian party had wanted, and far more revolutionary than the instinctive royalism of most English people could readily countenance. One of the immediate tasks of the new government was accordingly to persuade such moderate and hostile groups that the revolution was really over. They had to be given reasons for ‘engaging’ with the newly established Commonwealth, accepting and swearing allegiance to it rather than trying to continue the fight. There was a need, in other words, for a theory of political obligation in terms of which the new government could be legitimated. And it was clear that any such theory would in turn have to satisfy two contrasting conditions. It would need to be couched in a sufficiently familiar form to be acceptable to presbyterian and even royalist opinion. But it would need at the same time to be capable of performing the revolutionary task of justifying the duty to obey a merely de facto and usurping political power.

The Council of State was plainly aware of the need, which it sought to meet in March 1649 with its own Declaration, ‘expressing the grounds of their late proceedings, and of setling the present government in the way of a free state’.

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Visions of Politics , pp. 287 - 307
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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