Essential to understanding the modern world, for better or worse.
I figured you'd be a huge fan.
Lol. I don’t actually consider my worldview to be very Hobbesian. Thank you. Why do you say so?
Eh, I just get the impression that you favor a strong, undivided government ruled by a set of principles that's rather peculiar. Plus you would probably agree with Hobbes that the solitary state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" and therefore in need of firm restraint.
I’d have a hard time asserting there ever was s “state of nature”, given the sort of ubiquity of human social organization—pregovernmental institutions still governed. But in a society with near-unlimited technological destructive capabilities and the ability of “social pathogens” of a sort to spread very easily, I would say that a strong state is necessary to allow us to live in our own “states of nature”—ie, the parochial recent past that “conservatives” imagine recreating requires a far greater amount of government involvement than they think. Conservationism is necessary for hunting, morality is needed for markets, lenience is needed for obedience, etc. Ironically, despite this, I’d still probably favor a more “liberal” criminal justice system than we currently have, as I would prefer a strong emphasis on community reintegration.
EDIT: And, obviously, the central irony is that a strong and technologically-advanced security state would be a prerequisite to defending the right to be backwards. (Not that I’m a complete troglodyte—far from it)
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