In the 17th century, the Christian and civic republican traditions were subject to fundamental criticism by Thomas Hobbes, especially in his Leviathan (1651). Hobbes also pioneered an approach to social analysis based on exploring the passions and the ways they could be put to socially positive uses through institutions. Hobbes’s great importance, for our themes, lies in his emphasis on this-worldly happiness as the goal of government; and for his early explorations of the role of self-love in human affairs; and for his abandonment of the notion that the role of government is to guide us to some shared purpose, some highest ideal, be it religious holiness or civic virtue