Guy Patin, Thomas Hobbes et le Theophrastus redivivus

The Theophrastus redivivus is generally considered to be a pre-modern – or even anti-modern – philosophical text and this interpretation is barely questionable. But there is more to the picture: early-modern philosophers such as Hobbes, Gassendi or Descartes are not entirely ignored by the author (i.e. by Guy Patin, if our attribution is correct), and there are traces of them here and there in the text. However, contrary to all modern philosophers who envisage, on different bases, a positive political solution for human natural conflicts (as Hobbes’s ‘covenant’), Patin advocates the return to the state of nature and the destruction of every political structure, which he considers to be inevitably repressive and incompatible with human happiness.