Abstract

Biographies of Thomas Hobbes are hardly lacking. Reik’s book, however, with its attention to aspects of Hobbes’s life not usually considered in a general biography and specifically with its use of manuscripts not previously consulted by Hobbes scholars is a definite addition to the literature on Hobbes. Though Reik begins by noting that a "modern biography of Hobbes…must be in large part a history of his thought for the simple reason that he never did much in the active sense", the value of this work lies not in its somewhat shallow analysis of Hobbes’s ideas, but in its description of the social, intellectual, literary, scientific, and religious worlds in which Hobbes moved and the particular individuals in all of these circles with whom Hobbes had associations-whether favorable or otherwise. One of Reik’s theses is that the basic orientation of Hobbes’s thought and writings was set in the English Renaissance and that this orientation was not cast aside as the intellectual climate of England moved towards the Enlightenment—a factor which seems to account, in part, for Hobbes’s position as something of a misfit towards the end of his life.