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
Conversation
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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oh no no, Straussian-*adjacent*, maybe, but by dumb luck and geographical accident, & never quite drank the kool-aid anyway even when I was indisputably *socially* implicated in the local Straussian cabal
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the Student Philosophical Society's Minister of Defense was the head of the Straussian student cabal, I was just the roommate and loyal opposition and/or advocatus diaboli (also SPS Minister of Culture)
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I really don't have a good specific reason not to say which one on a public feed but I dm'd anyway bc I still probably ought to keep it on a need-to-know basis for reasons that haven't occured to me yet
