One of John Pocock's most characteristic and fruitful procedures as an historian has been to fix his attention on what he likes to call the ‘language’ of public debate. His main concern has been to uncover the wide variety of discriminable idioms and modes of speech in which the societies of early modern Europe conducted their political arguments. But he has also shown that a sensitivity to the range of these idioms can engender new insights into the character of even the most closely analysed texts. Not without a touch of justified pride, he has recently reminded us of two important cases in which his studies of political language have yielded such results. As he has expressed it, one consequence of becoming attuned to nuances of vocabulary is that the historian ‘is constantly surprised and delighted to discover familiar languages in texts equally familiar, where they have not been noticed before – the language of prophetic exegesis in Leviathan, the idiom of denouncing paper credit in Reflections on the Revolution of France – though making these discoveries does not always enhance his respect for previous scholarship’.

My aim in what follows will be to pay homage to this aspect of John Pocock's theory and practice in two connected ways. I propose in the first place to return to Hobbes, concentrating specifically on the earliest formulations of his political philosophy. I wish in particular to focus on the views he expresses about the nature of civil science in The Elements of Law, first circulated in 1640, and in De cive, first published in 1642.