Mortal Gods

“Ted Miller's Mortal Gods is a great book, historically rich and theoretically innovative. His argument that Hobbes's humanist mathematical science is aggressively creative rather than descriptive or prescriptive institutes a debate where there has tended to be the consensus of a dominant interpretation. In prose that is fresh and lively, this is a provocative and rewarding read.” —Samantha Frost, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Ted Miller makes a persuasive, nuanced, and surprising case for leaving behind the view that Hobbes’s development as a thinker proceeded in two or three distinct phases. Miller shows Hobbes’s thought to be dynamically unified. . . . Hobbes’s signal innovation was to have recognized the persuasive rhetorical power of mathematical reasoning among influential elites and seized upon it as a means for reforming philosophical inquiry. The combination accounts, in Miller’s view, for the striking originality of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Miller’s deeply learned and richly detailed account offers an engaging portrait of Hobbes’s intellectual and cultural milieu—from the mathematical debates of his day, to the grand court masques of the Stuart era, to the plastic arts of theater and architecture. Along the way, Miller offers solid correctives to Quentin Skinner’s influential readings of Hobbes; engages the style, purposes, and effects of Hobbes’s work more broadly; and offers potent reflections on the relations of humanism, modernity, and politics.” —Dean Mathiowetz, University of California, Santa Cruz