The Prince was a hardheaded analysis of governance that was sponsored by a prince, so had to pretend that the prince was the hero. I think the same about Hobbes

The Prince was a hardheaded analysis of governance that was sponsored by a prince, so had to pretend that the prince was the hero. I think the same about Hobbes (or Spinoza or Descartes); with Protestantism came a huge and multiplying number of heresies from Catholic orthodoxy, and materialist atheists could write about rationality through extremely abstract metaphors that they referred to with Christian labels. The same applied to royalty, who were the intermediaries between God and man, and often the patrons of these secular scholars. i.e. don't deny God, don't deny the King, and you can finally write about reality.