Aw, hail naw. Nobody f*cks with my social contractualist homies. Why yes, I am writing while so abundantly drunk that Locke, when writing about his proviso which would later be adapted to the Norman yoke, would have thought "oh damn, just have some coffee and go to bed, dude". Therefore...well, tongue-in-cheek, grain of salt, et cetera.
Jammy Fingers said:
the one fallasy of Hobbes is that if as an individual Mankind is a savage beast
Blah blah F*ckin' blah.
they were going to burn him and his books but he was saved by Charles II whom he had tutored while self-exiled in France.
No, Hobbes was a monarchist writing in response to the English Civil War and the Treaty of Westphalia. He
liked monarchy, and in response to the burgeoning Enlightenment philosophers sought a rationalist solution to the question of why monarchy is necessary. The Hobbesian state of nature was concluded, and the contract created, out of mankind's capability to
reason the Hobbisan state of nature would end in tragedy. That's kind of a PITA, so in order to save our individual asses, we
contracted with one another to
create society under an autocracy, whether that be by monarchy, aristocracy, or democratic tyrant. It's evolution, baby! Mutually assured destruction. That's what Hobbesian society seeks to avert, and why the Leviathan is Pretty G*dd*mn Important.
In other words, we had the capacity to figure out life was nasty, brutish and short. We didn't like that. So we averted that with...
society! Ya dun like it? Read that other half of
Leviathan -- you know, that half where he talks about religion and scriptural literacy by monarchical right; somebody loved them some Henry VIII and his multitude of headless bizzitches. Yep, he cheesed off a lot of folks...the same ones who'd be licking Locke's William of Orange-loving, Irish-f*cking, taint-sweat screaming "
YUM YUM BEEYOTCH!" and doing middling crap like writing the Declaration of Independence another century later. Suck it.
Country Whigs represent, yo. West Say-eed, bizzatch. French land redistributed to enfranchise the common man to create a yeoman-farmer society for everyone! F*ck the man, and anybody trying to craft an
a priori argument as to why tyranny is a Good Thing can lick my 100% Flag-Waving Jingoist who knows his Modern Philosophy American ballsack.
Rousseau? You mean the proto-Marxist, pre-Hegelian, dialectic mofo that was into some kinky ass shizzite like nun spankings a-plenty and was so balls-out rockstar he got kicked out of
David Hume's house for chrissake? Oh yeah, 18th Century philosophers were
Human reason was the
basis for the desire to own property. The Rousseauvian state of nature was
absent the capacity for reason, which makes him such a world-grade cock towards the Native Americans. Don't make me bust out my personal copy of
A Discourse on Inequality or
The Social Contract for citations. Everything else is secondary, including the desire to regulate and institutionalize inequality. Which, by the way, was a intermediary step for the development and enactment of the General Will, which would make any given Tea Partier on Earth crap their pants and run home screaming for the warm and gentle embrace of Sarah Palin's saggy grandma derp-baby funbags.
