In a 1939 lecture delivered before the British Academy, George P. Gooch declared, “Hobbes is the earliest, the most original, and the least English of our three great political thinkers.” This statement might appear curious in light of the fact that Hobbes's political thought is often seen as inseparable from the events that characterized English political life in the seventeenth century, but it was quite accurate from Gooch's vantage point. Although Hobbes's writings on politics and religion had engendered considerable controversy in England in the latter half of the seventeenth century, by the middle of the eighteenth century there was very little English interest in Hobbes's political thought. By the late nineteenth century, English scholarship on Hobbes's political writings was a rarity; Hobbes still appealed to his countrymen as a philosopher, literary stylist, translator, and historian, but not as a political thinker. In Europe, however, Hobbes's reception was quite different. As Hobbes himself notes in his autobiographical poem, his political theory received immediate attention there. French, Italian, and German interest, in particular, continued for the next two centuries, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of scholarship on Hobbes's political thought was of German origin. Hobbes's political views had been branded totalitarian repeatedly, but this line of criticism assumed a special significance in the 1930s.