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What do you think of Hobbe's Leviathan?
I'm just reading Part II. (Of Commonwealth) and I'm having a hard time believing what he describes as Commonwealth-- a unity of all subjects behind their sovereign as if they were the author of all their sovereign's actions-- is even possible in reality. Even in the most unified monarchy you're still going to get large groups of people who don't feel like they "own" the actions of their king, and so discord is inevitable.
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This is stupid. It doesn't matter if you think it would "work," because in reality the book was hugely influential to the development of modern political conception. It's not a platform, it's theory. And it's importance is that Hobbes was one of the first thinkers to make the citizenry centrally important to the organization of a society.
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It doesn't matter if they dislike their monarch's actions. For hobbes, the sovereign is only supposed to provide safety, sustainability, and predictability. It doesn't matter what his subjects think.
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>>8768189
Sovereign's legitimacy is based upon the soke aasuption that people would be worse off in the state of nature.
The whole "constant state of war" idea is, however, flawed, as it is a pseudohistorical attempt to imagine a primitive society. According to Hobbes, before a state was created, people lived individual lives nit associating themselves with any collective. But if you look at our history, there was never a point in time when people lived in a state of nature as envisaged by Hobbes.
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More like Hobo's Levi-Ass-an ;)
Do I lose a lot if I don't really know the historical context?
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>>8768189
He basically just copied The Republic and added a Renaissance twist. Hobbe's political philosophy is utterly incompatible with a mechanistic worldview. Why do we need government when we aren't even men, but bipedal automatons.
They say angels would have no need of government, well neither would robots.
Hobbes was little more than a stupid, bitter cunt, who couldn't get any pussy in an era when getting pussy was relatively easy.
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>>8768189
The unity of subjects as the body of the sovereign is allegorical. Take a look at the frontispiece of Leviathan.
>>8768639
Hobbes himself states that the state of nature and the forming of a commonwealth are ahistorical. But he's not conducting a history lesson; he's enumerating the fundamentals of liberal political legitimacy.
>>8768677
>a work of political philosophy copied a work about the just condition of the soul
I thought really hard about this one.
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