Hobbes's conception of civil science in The Elements of Law and De Cive is founded on the belief that scientific reasoning possesses an inherent power to persuade us of the truths it finds out. By contrast, Leviathan declares that the sciences are small power, and reverts to the typically humanist assumption that, if we are to succeed in persuading others to accept our arguments, we shall have to supplement the findings of reason with the moving force of eloquence. A shift in outlook so profound and comprehensive clearly calls for an explanation. What made Hobbes change his mind about the idea of a civil science? What prompted him to adopt in Leviathan the very approach he had earlier repudiated?

One factor worth considering is that in Leviathan Hobbes evidently takes himself to be addressing a new type of audience, an audience at once broader and less well-educated than he had previously sought to reach. Although The Elements is in English, Hobbes explicitly tells us that his ambition in writing it was to insinuate its doctrines into the minds of ‘those whom the matter it contayneth most neerly concerneth’. De Cive is no less clearly intended for an elite, especially as it was written in Latin, a language which as Hobbes later observed ‘is not commonly used by any Nation now in the world’. By contrast with these narrow if lofty aspirations, Hobbes describes himself in the epistle dedicatory to Leviathan as offering his theory to the whole world, and reiterates in his final chapter that he plans to submit his work to the censure of his fellow-countrymen at large.