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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I’ll take views informed by more data everytime, since political science/philosophy isn’t a field with prodigy/genius talents imo. Above basic competence/diligence, thinkers seem comparable in skill but not in data and perspective breadth they can enjoy
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basically agree but that's not as relevant to how or what to read as it might seem, ime -- I don't think genius is much of a factor in how canonical a philosopher becomes anyway, actually, but European philosophy's tendency to operate on a tacit "great man" theory definitely is
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there are big names you kind of do *have* to read, not bc "genius" but more bc almost *everyone else* you've heard of who wrote on the same topics encountered them and is being influenced by them consciously or unconsciously, so they become canon by a kind of path-dependence
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There's a tendency to a sort of philosopher equivalent of constitutional originalism. Where the "original" version of an idea becomes sacred for no good reason. You see the same thing in the east with the Vedas or Confucius etc.
yep, exactly, and more fully articulated than my vague gesture at "great man theory" too
the "great" individual is a fruiting body of an organism that's mostly invisible, it's too easy to forget the health of the invisible mass is critical to whether any ever come up at all
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