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It has become something of an orthodoxy among Hobbes scholars to see a dramatic change in Hobbes’s intellectual development in the 1640s, that is, between the earlier works The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1640) and De Cive (1642) on the one hand and Leviathan (1651) on the other. Various accounts have been given to explain these differences, dependent on the issue at stake (rhetoric, methodology, political philosophy, theology, ecclesiastical polity), but what they have in common is their stress on the radical character of Hobbes’s turn of mind in that crucial decade of his exile. David Johnston, for example, has claimed that Leviathan is an intensely polemical work that differs significantly in style and content from the earlier works: “this dramatic change in literary form was connected with important changes in the substance of his political theory, and [was] ultimately symptomatic of an underlying metamorphosis in his conception of the nature and aims of political philosophy.” He sees the cause of this metamorphosis in Hobbes’s growing realization that reason cannot assert itself. Most people are superstitious, gullible, and irrational, and these features are ingrained in them. Hence what Hobbes wants to do in Leviathan is to initiate a “cultural transformation” by bringing people to see their own blindness, thereby leading “men toward that enlightened, rational understanding of their own interests which he believes will form the firmest foundation possible for a truly lasting commonwealth.” Quentin Skinner too argues that “Leviathan embodies a new and far

Hobbes on Religion and the Church between The Elements of Law and Leviathan : A Dramatic Change of Direction?