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.
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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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e.g. Fukuyama isn't a complete boob but he's a popularizer of Hegel via Kojève and would probably own up to it if you pressed him on it, and fair enough -- not his fault people other than him advertise him as anything more than that
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Not at all. I’m familiar enough with those two to regard him as a serious synthesizer beyond them. You vastly underestimate the sheer amount of data the last century has provided. He’s primarily an interpreter of recent history more than of Hegel via Kojeve.
End of Hostory is an acknowledged Hegel exegesis, but his Origins of Political Order/Political Order Political Decay are definitely far beyond
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