Early modern readers mostly rejected the Hobbesian, not the republican, view of liberty

Evidence

Hobbes issued a powerful challenge to the republican tradition of thinking in setting out this understanding of freedom, and this implication for the relation between law and liberty. His own ultimate end was the defence of authoritarian government, and it served his purposes well to be able to argue that no set of laws was particularly associated with liberty; it meant that the laws of an authoritarian Leviathan could not be faulted on traditional republican grounds and that his case for such a state could be given a decent hearing: it would not be laughed out of court. … Hobbes was widely read over the following century or so, but it is striking that most of his readers stuck with the republican way of thinking. The most outstanding exception is another authoritarian thinker, though one of a different stripe from Hobbes. Sir Robert Filmer held that perfect liberty would require the absence of laws, ‘for it is no law except it restrain liberty’ (Filmer 1991: 268). ‘But such liberty’, he then argued, ‘is not to be found in any commonweal, for there are more laws in popular estates than anywhere else, and so consequently less liberty’ (p. 275). — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the republican-vs-liberal liberty debate the reader is tracing through Pettit; Hobbes and Filmer define the foil the republican tradition opposes. — connects to: Hobbesian freedom-as-non-interference displaced republican non-domination only in later eighteenth-century writings — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 222

Broader Connections

• Hobbesian freedom-as-non-interference displaced republican non-domination only in later eighteenth-century writings #contradicts (0.90) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 222