The project of reconstructing the intellectual currents that shaped Hobbes’s thought, and the ideological and scientific debates in which Hobbes intervened, has long been associated with Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School. As practiced by the Cambridge School, the method of historical contextualization presupposes a division of labor between historical inquiry and normative argument. The crucial task for Hobbes scholarship, on this view, is to figure out what Hobbes meant to say as a participant in seventeenth-century controversies. Contextualization allows us to understand his goals as an ideological combatant, partisans of this approach contend—but it provides no traction on normative questions that preoccupy us today. Yet as Ted Miller demonstrates in Mortal Gods, historical contextualization need not presuppose this strict division of labor. Miller exemplifies a new kind of historicism, one increasingly at home in the “broad, relatively fragmented and freewheeling constellation of curiosities of political theory as it is primarily practiced in departments of political science in the United States and Canada” (p. 1). Mustering resources of erudition toward nonantiquarian ends, he helps to liberate Hobbes scholarship from methodological constraints that have grown increasingly confining.

It is fitting that Miller issues a forceful challenge to methodological orthodoxy, since, on his reading, audacity is Hobbes’s signature trait. Miller insists that we take Hobbes’s God-rivaling ambitions seriously. No mere rhetorical flourish, Hobbes’s description of the commonwealth as a mortal God reflects his unprecedented aspiration to “establish human sovereignty over chaos” (p. 8). Miller arrives at this portrait of Hobbes as an aspirant to sovereign mastery through a claim for the unity of Hobbes’s thought. Against “phased views” (such as Skinner’s) that depict Hobbes as jettisoning his early, humanist convictions for the rigors of geometric method, only to make an ambivalent return to rhetoric in Leviathan, Miller contends that “as regards mathematics and humanism, Hobbes had a single phase” (p. 9). As the author demonstrates, in the early modern period mathematics was a key part of humanist education and ethics. Thus, Hobbes remains within humanist traditions when he extols mathematical reasoning as a source of human power. Yet Hobbes puts humanist enthusiasm for mathematics to use “in new, more focused and aggressive ways” (p. 33). Specifically, Hobbes “invites his readers to imitate God,” turning philosophy into a science of independent human creation (p. 50).

Miller couches this interpretation as a rejoinder to Hobbes’s (unnamed) “scientific admirers,” by whom he appears to mean scholars who venerate Hobbes as a rational choice theorist or progenitor of positivist social science (p. 3). Miller is certainly correct that for Hobbes, science aims neither to explain the workings of the natural world nor to predict human behavior. Yet few contemporary scholars would attribute these positions to Hobbes. Miller’s interpretation is more valuable as an intervention into contemporary democratic theory than as a rejoinder to Hobbes’s scientific admirers, who are no longer ascendant. On Miller’s reading, Hobbes’s political authoritarianism is of a piece with his acknowledgment of “ontological indeterminacy” (p. 209). By Hobbes’s admission, sovereignty lacks foundation in God, nature, or tradition—but this admission does not weaken sovereign power. If anything, acknowledgment of “the world’s chaotic and contingent nature” strengthens sovereignty, because, on Hobbes’s view, appeals to artifice provide a stronger basis for obligation than appeals to nature (p. 8).

With this portrait of Hobbes as a theorist of contingency, Miller reminds Hobbes's “antifoundational critics” (such as William Connolly) that renouncing appeals to nature does not immunize a theorist against the temptations of order, coercion, and domination (p. 201). Radical democrats often assume that “exposure is a prelude to diminution” (p. 208). Yet, as the author reminds readers, exposing the artifice that lurks behind purportedly natural categories, identities, and institutions is not, in and of itself, a democratic gesture. With the reminder that antifoundational exposure must be embedded in a more comprehensive ethical project if it is to do emancipatory work, he shows how historical contextualization can help to reframe contemporary debate.

Although Miller makes a powerful and pointed argument for the unity of Hobbes’s thought, there is a tension at the heart of his interpretation. On the one hand, Miller depicts Hobbes as a proud proponent of “creative autonomy” who elevates philosophers to divine stature (p. 49). On the other hand, Miller’s contextualizing arguments cut Hobbes down to size, recalling his subordinate position within the Stuart court. Ironically, acceptance of Miller’s invitation to read Leviathan as a masque-text, and Hobbes as a court philosopher, inspires doubts about “just how thoroughly Hobbes proposed to make man the imitator of God through his science” (p. 5). Indeed, if we scrutinize Miller’s claims about the imitation of God, Hobbes appears more modest than the author allows.

Who imitates God in Miller’s story? Throughout Mortal Gods, the identity of the imitator shifts. At moments, as in the passage just cited, Hobbes promises divine mastery to humanity as a whole (through the medium of philosophy). In other passages, it is the philosopher himself who imitates divine creation. Here, “architectonic ambition” is a philosophical signature: “When philosophers find chaos, in language, in heads, or in politics, their task is to set it right by stamping an order on it” (pp. 82, 79). Toward the book’s conclusion, however, imitation appears to be the sovereign’s prerogative. Situating Hobbes within the patronage system of the Stuart court, Miller reads his rhetorical strategies, in Leviathan, as an appeal to the sovereign. Here, Hobbes is a supplicant seeking to curry favor with a patron—whom he flatters with the promise “that he is to become like a god through construction” (p. 198). At this point in the argument, Hobbes appears to have been demoted from divine architect to fawning courtier. If philosophers must secure political patronage to wrest order from chaos, they are hardly God-like—because God does not need a patron. Moreover, when cast as a patron, the sovereign bears scant resemblance to Hobbes’s omnipotent God, whose rule over nature is not contingent on human consent.

But is the God whom Hobbes would ostensibly imitate actually Hobbes’s God? There is a troubling vagueness about God at the heart of Miller’s claim that Hobbes harbors God-rivaling ambitions. Miller vacillates regarding the identity of the deity who is imitated. At times, Hobbes would enthrone the sovereign as a (pagan?) god. By granting the sovereign “absolute rule over his subjects,” Miller argues, Hobbes “makes him a god” (p. 196). At other times, however, “Hobbes turns the sovereign into the Judeo-Christian God” (p. 199). Here, “God’s sovereignty over nature, as creator,” is the “implicit model for the activity of Hobbes’ science” and, by extension, for the sovereign’s rule (p. 5). Yet according to Hobbes, God’s sovereignty over nature is qualitatively different from human sovereignty, because God’s sovereignty over nature does not derive from consent. In Chapter 31 of Leviathan (1651), “Of the Kingdom of God by Nature,” Hobbes distinguishes God’s sovereignty by nature, which derives from his “irresistible power,” from God’s sovereignty over the Jews, which is grounded on their consent. In the state of nature, Hobbes explains, sovereignty arises by consent precisely because humans lack omnipotence. The state of nature is a state of war, which we can only exit through convention, because nature does not endow any human being with irresistible power. Thus, on Hobbes’s reading, humans can approximate God’s political arrangements quite closely, but their creativity will always be of a different order, precisely because it rests on pacts and covenants (whether linguistic or political). If we recall his taxonomy of divine sovereignty, the claim that he would mimic God’s rule over nature proves unpersuasive.

The claim that Hobbes endorses political absolutism—the sovereignty of a mere god—lacks the drama of the claim that he rivals the omnipotent God. But Hobbes is no less aggressive, and no less bold, if the power that he seeks is a specifically human power. If the Hobbes who emerges from Miller’s painstaking historical reconstruction is more modest than the author leads us to believe, this is a testament to his achievement—for he has brought Hobbes down from the timeless philosophical pantheon into the protean world of mortal men and women.