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.
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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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hm... ok, yeah, to me Fukuyama is still synonymous with EoH and I haven't read Origins of Political Order (aha, 2011 -- that'd be why) so I'll concede it's entirely possible you're right and I'm wrong on this, full stop
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as a general observation, tho, data matters exactly to the extent the question you're asking is empirical -- & cargo-cult empiricism is rampant enough in "social sciences" that tbh I do kind of cringe when I hear "data" even tho I really really wish I didn't
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I mean it loosely in the sense of tasteful historical analysis, which is exactly what Fukuyama is excellent at. Not whiggish Hans Rosling graphs showing sunny up-and-to-the-right stats.
