hm, blame the limits of twitter, maybe, but afaict it seems silly and incoherent bc you're reading me as arguing the exact inverse of what I am arguing
tbf I am arguing from a *slightly* heterodox reading of Hobbes & his place in the schema of early modern political philosophy
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- I'm explicity casting doubt that that whatever psychological truth Maslow has in the finite scope of modernity will still hold up in a wider historical scope (let alone ahistorically), partly bc
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- it closely tracks Hobbes's account, which is usu taken as his descriptive account of the individual psyche
- it isn't. H was describing what the psyche of the typical individual citizen/subject of the state would *have* to be in order to achieve political stability under it
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it's very much normative rather than descriptive, and Hobbes was pretty clear that would have to whatever means they had at their disposal to cultivate it, bc people are pointedly *not* "naturally" Hobbesian subjects
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which casts doubt on MH's transhistorical psychological accuracy bc we're looking at ppl in an era of political systems premised on Hobbes going "ok look, our problem is the great masses of people *don't* crave security as badly as we need them to -- so we need to *teach* them."
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so for all we know MH's accuracy may be nothing more than just a measure of how well that citizen-education program worked -- water to fish
granted that's an empirically tractable question and it's hard-to-impossible to get good data on so ultimately who knows
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also Leviathan isn't "monarchy", it's a much bigger concept & wholly encompasses liberal-democratic nation-states. the idea of state monopoly on legitimate violence is part of it -- philosophically that idea comes as much from Hobbes as from anyone else
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I was responding to your reactionary sympathy point, which suggested a 1700s vintage pre-liberal-democracy narrow Hobbes reading. Maybe current understand is expansive but I doubt in 1700s our 20th century forms were clearly foreseeable.
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don't think they have to be clearly foreseeable as long as they're still iterated refinements of base ideas that were laid out in the 1700s. we have QM, relativity & mature non-euclidian geometry now but lots of problems are still solved in euclidian or newtonian domains
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"you don't really *have* to read anything after 18c to get a handle on this" is to philosophy as solving problems you've measured out the scope of and know quantitatively you can do without having to account for relativity is to physics, roughly
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I tend to have the opposite bias. I haven’t read Hobbes or Plato or anyone like that. Everything I need to know about political science I learned from Francis Fukuyama, James Scott, and Wikipedia.
eh, tbqh my bias is a lot of contemporary political writing is ... distinctly unimpressive when you know what wheel they're reinventing and know the original well enough to notice all the ways the reinvention is rougher
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