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William Lamont, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Page 1091, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem222
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Hobbes studies have rarely been stronger. Dr Collins is properly respectful of the contribution made in recent years by three scholars of distinction, Quentin Skinner, Noel Malcolm and Richard Tuck. But Collins is his own man and has made, in his first book, a contribution to rival theirs. He is aware how much our revised view of Hobbes has been shaped by Skinner having placed him in the context of contemporary debates on de facto arguments for rule in the 1650s. This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition in Collins's view: de facto allegiance is not so much wrong, as too tepid a term to describe what Hobbes felt about the magistracy of Oliver Cromwell. He finds the key in the Protestant Erastian tradition which both men shared, and is brilliantly described in his opening chapter. In making this highly persuasive case, he has fresh and interesting things to say about the influence of Blackloist Catholics, magisterial Independent Protestants, and how we should read Leviathan in the light of his later Behemoth. I think that there is a missing element which does not weaken the case which Collins mounts, but might, if used, strengthen it further. This is recognition of the importance to both Hobbes and Cromwell of the apocalyptic dimensions of magistracy. He has two glancing references to John Pocock in his Index, but in what was, in reality if not in name, Pocock's Festschrift (Political discourse in early modern Britain, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner, Cambridge U.P., 1993; rev. ante, cxi [1996], 191–2). Richard Tuck argued that it was Pocock's 1968 essay which was the breakthrough in Hobbes studies by shifting attention from the first two Books of Leviathan to the last two and to its apocalyptic content. John Foxe does not get even one reference in Collins’s study (which must be some sort of record) and John Jewel merely two. They needed to be present in his otherwise comprehensive discussion of Protestant Erastianism.
