Questions Sep 15/16

Machiavelli, Hobbes, LH 9-10

1. What did Machiavelli say a leader needs to have?

2. Machiavelli's philosophy is described as being "rooted" in what?

3. The idea that leaders should rule by fear is based on what view of human nature?

4. Life outside society would be what, according to Hobbes?

5. What fear influenced Hobbes' writings?

6. Hobbes did not believe in the existence of what?

Thomas Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher who is on hand to guide us through one of the thorniest issues of politics: to what extent should we patiently obey rulers, especially those who are not very good – and to what extent should we start revolutions and depose governments in search of a better world?

Hobbes’s thinking is inseparable from one major event that began when he was 64 years old – and was to mark him so deeply, it coloured all this subsequent thinking (remarkably he died when he was 91 and everything he is remembered for today he wrote after the age of 60).

This event was the English Civil war, a vicious, divisive, costly and murderous conflict that raged across England for almost a decade and pitted the forces of King against Parliament, leading to the deaths of some 200,000 people on both sides.

Hobbes was by nature a deeply peaceful and cautious man. He hated violence of all kinds, a disposition that began at the age of four, when his own father, a clergyman, was disgraced, and abandoned his wife and family, after he’d got into a fight with another vicar on the steps of his parish church in a village in Wiltshire.

The work for which we chiefly remember Hobbes, Leviathan, was published in 1651. It is the most definitive, persuasive and eloquent statement ever produced as to why one should obey government authority, even of a very imperfect kind, in order to avoid the risk of chaos and bloodshed... (SoL, continues)






CHAPTER 6. CURRICULUM: POLITICAL THEORY
Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys

Machiavelli was a 16th-century Florentine political thinker with powerful advice for nice people who don’t get very far. His thought pivots around a central, uncomfortable observation: that the wicked tend to win. And they do so because they have a huge advantage over the good: they are willing to act with the darkest ingenuity and...

CHAPTER 6. CURRICULUM: POLITICAL THEORY
Niccolò Machiavelli

Our assessment of politicians is torn between hope and disappointment. On the one hand, we have an idealistic idea that a politician should be an upright hero, a man or woman who can breathe new moral life into the corrupt workings of the state. However, we are also regularly catapulted into cynicism when we realise...

DQ

• Do you agree with Machiavelli that it's okay for a leader to lie if he perceives it to be in the best interest of his people?
• Do you agree with Hobbes that, left to our own devices and without the authority of the state and its institutions and laws to govern us, we would create a "war of all against all"?
• Is there a sharp difference between writing well and thinking logically? Why do you think so many scholastic/medieval philosophers were poor writers? How can you become a better writer and clearer thinker?
• Was Machiavelli right, about how power works in the real world?
• If European explorers like Vespucci understood that European knowledge was at best incomplete, at worst just wrong, why were so many of them still so confident that the natives they encountered in the New World were sub-human? Why in general are humans still so quick to denigrate those who are different, or who have different customs?
• Is there any proper place for astrology and magic in the modern world?
• COMMENT: 'The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." -Mark Twain. 
• It's been estimated that the average social media user could read 200 books in the time they spend online. What would they gain? What would they lose? What's the right balance?
• Do you trust your own conscience and experience more than that of religious leaders like the Pope? Why? 441
• Does knowledge need foundations? Why or why not?
• Can you agree with Machiavelli about leadership without being a sexist or an autocrat?
• Are people fundamentally selfish, in your experience? Are you? Can selfish people change?
• What memorable hiking experience have you had? Tell us about it!
• Our JW author emphasizes the importance of beginning any great effort under the right circumstances. Do you have a similar opinion? What do you make sure to do before you begin a signficant task?

Arts & Letters Daily search results for “hobbes” (11)

2012-12-12 | Before Hobbes, political thought was historical thought, much of it wacky. Since Hobbes, political thought is about ideas, many of them preposterous more »

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2019-05-25 | Step aside, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill. Meet the oddballs, underdogs, and outcasts of British philosophy more »

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2010-01-01 | Thomas Hobbes: a hero to some, but to many philosophers the source of a malignant liberalism, Jacobinism, or even Bolshevism more »

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2016-09-24 | When the milieu makes the philosopher. Descartes, Hobbes, and their contemporaries lived through the Scientific Revolution and several wars of religion. Their narratives matter more »

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2015-02-10 | Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Diderot, Rousseau: Esotericism ? disguising real meaning through surface contradiction ? was an art that is all but lost more »

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2012-08-18 | Leviathan was always an enemy-maker for Hobbes, for a time the most loathed thinker in Britain. But his heresies helped generate British philosophy more »

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2018-09-06 | Hobbes, Hume, and Kant alike sympathetic to the thought that “there must be something more,” and sensitive to the limits of speculating about God more »

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2018-04-27 | How blank are our slates? Hobbes and Rousseau believed in the existence of human nature, but today’s philosophers are skeptical. Biology suggests an answer more »

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2017-04-21 | We suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” and the accompanying pretenses of citified life. Take a cue from Hobbes, Rousseau, Einstein, Dickens, and Hazlitt: Take a hike more »

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2016-10-08 | So Hobbes was an atheist with a gloomy view of human nature? Rousseau believed in a peace-loving “noble savage”? Wrong and wrong. We misunderstand the great philosophers  more »

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2017-09-13 | The Enlightenment emerged from a 150-year “staccato burst” of European philosophy. Why did these thinkers — Hobbes, Descarte, Voltaire, Rousseau — write as they did?  more »

2021-01-07 | Amid these apocalyptic-seeming times, one philosopher’s vision stands out. This is a moment for Machiavelli more »

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2018-11-21 | Calculating, cutthroat, self-interested, teacher of tyrants: What was Machiavelli up to? Debunking ideas of virtue and vice more »

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2015-08-08 | Machiavelli was brilliant, ruthless, cunning, clear-eyed, mercurial, a little boastful, and pathetic. But a comedian? more »

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2020-05-05 | What was most shocking about Machiavelli wasn't original, and what was original wasn't shocking: his realism more »

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2014-12-13 | 'I never say what I believe and I never believe what I say,' declared Machiavelli. 'If I sometimes say the truth, I conceal it among lies? more »

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2013-10-08 | 'I depart from the orders of others.' With that, Machiavelli reconceived both politics and philosophy. He was not a product of his time, but the father of ours more »

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2011-01-01 | Niccolo Machiavelli was an amoebic being: imperialist, proto-libertarian, atheist, neo-pagan, Christian, lover of freedom, tutor to despots, armchair strategist more »

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2013-09-26 | Machiavelli was not so much cruel as unsentimental. His worst instincts were tempered not by moral concern but by prudence. He was a realist more »

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2015-02-10 | Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Diderot, Rousseau: Esotericism ? disguising real meaning through surface contradiction ? was an art that is all but lost more »

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2013-11-22 | Machiavelli has been unjustifiably scandalous for 500 years. Why? Critics mistake his realism for cynicism, his impatience with moralizing for cruelty more »

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2013-07-25 | Whether or not he was an apologist for violence, an enemy of virtue, Machiavelli knew that in politics, one should never confuse hope and reality more »

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2012-08-16 | Sincerity is a fickle friend, an artful pretense. Machiavelli manipulated it, Montaigne prized it, the Romantics made a fetish of it more »

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2015-05-26 | Weighing Machiavelli, Dale Carnegie, and "the no-asshole rule," we've endured a long debate about what personality type breeds success more »

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2017-05-08 | Satan's emissary, cunning fox, cold-blooded destroyer: That's the conventional view of Machiavelli. But was his advice in The Prince really meant to be followed? more »

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2017-03-18 | Machiavelli was not Machiavellian, but just a good-hearted guy who wrote The Prince ironically. Or so asserts a new book. Terry Eagleton is having none of it more »

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2015-12-10 | A modern Machiavelli. Edward Luttwak is a TLS-toting, bovine-raising intellectual. He claims a central role in the Prague Spring and in creating the Toyota Prius more »

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2017-03-03 | The myth of Machiavelli as an amoral schemer is just that — a myth. But as to whether he had a dim view of women, even by the standard of Florentine men of his era: guilty as charged more »

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Old posts-

Machiavelli & Hobbes, Osgood & Scully

What a memorable weekend, beginning Friday night with Ron Howard’s Eight Days A Week at the Belcourt. The lads from Liverpool are timelessly, endlessly inspiring. Opie still impresses too.

Then there was Saturday’s superior sushi at Sonobana. Try the crawdad roll, if you go.

Yesterday’s departure of two grand old men, honeyed voices of the airwaves I’ve been making a ritual point of hearing my entire adult lifetime, was even more moving than anticipated: Charles Osgood, from Sunday Morning, and Vin Scully, from the Dodgers. Two more exemplary long lives for my collection, two more ringing endorsements of Theodore Geisel’s smart optimism: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” See you on the radio, Charley. And a very pleasant good evening to you, Vin. It’s been good to know you both, though of course we’ve never actually met. The connective power of broadcast speech outpaces mere proximity, and shrinks the planet in the best way.

The lives they’ve lived stand as a strong rebuke to the low estimation of humanity we find in today’s CoPhi philosophers, a pair of Power Politics proponents who expected the worst from people.

Italian Niccolo Machiavelli was all about appearances. He admired lions and foxes but seems in many ways to have been more like a chameleon, changing colors and stripes to suit situations, procure patronage, and manipulate people. Really, though, only the human animal is capable of the kind of duplicity and means-end rationalization he urged. Russell liked him more than I do, for his absence of “humbug.” If “success” in a leader means simply staying power, a talent for deception, and a mania for winning, I vote for failure.

Brit Thomas Hobbes (“Tommy,” my first PoliSci prof familiarly named him, “mainlining on utopia”) was a peripatetic who derived great energy from his daily perambulations. Frederic Gros doesn’t tell us that in his little “Energy” chapter, but Hobbes would certainly have agreed that the solid support of earth under foot makes realistic alliance with the pull of gravity. He thought we ought to build similar stability into our public institutions.

“He would go out for a long walk every morning, striding quickly up hills so as to get quickly out of breath” and to get ideas, which he preserved by extracting a quill from his walking stick. He seems to have been hail, healthy, hardy, and happy, living into his 90s (but not an optimist). Not the guy you’d expect to stump for a maximum state like his awe-inspiring mortal God “Leviathan.”

Hobbes was a “rigid determinist” but something got him up and going each morning, out into the English countryside. Did it really feel involuntary? Does it? Not to me.

He didn’t find any intrinsic  difference between religion and superstition, but thought the former might have its uses for the state. Like everything else, legislation governing what belief and conduct to allow in “utopia” is supposed to make life (not people, contrary to what a student once told me) less nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes had nothing against vertically challenged individuals.

It’s a good day to be thinking about what qualities we desire in our leader and our nation. I’m not holding my breath for an edifying debate tonight, but as Mr. Osgood always said: “we’ll be watching.” Too bad he and Vin aren’t on the ballot. As Vin once said, we’re all “day to day.”

6 am/6:40, 67/74/51, 6:36

Hobbes “walked much and contemplated”

Machiavelli and Hobbes are on tap in CoPhi today. Students often come to them already intrigued with the former but unaware of the latter, though both their names have become adjectival terms of notoriety. Beware Machiavellian politicos and their ends-justify-the-means mentality, we all seem to have been forewarned, and beware Machiaveliian schemers generally. But while the last century spawned chilling examples of totalitarianism and its murderous toll, fewer of us have been alerted to the dangers of the Hobbesian superstate.

The explanation could have something to do with the evident sweetness of temper of “Tommy” Hobbes (as my old poli-sci prof at UMSL called him), who envisioned Leviathan but exemplified something more like the lamb in his personal conduct and bearing. Simon Critchley’s Book of Dead Philosophers offers an endearing glimpse of a true English eccentric. He “avoided excess ‘as to wine and women’ and stopped drinking at age sixty,” he “walked vigorously every day to work up a sweat… and expel any excessive moisture,” he sang “prick-songs” late at night to stimulate his lungs and lengthen his life.

My favorite thing about Hobbes remains, naturally, his peripatetic nature. He walked to work up a sweat but also to stimulate ideas, which he’d interrupt himself long enough to record by disengaging the quill from his walking stick. “He walked much and contemplated,” says Aubrey’s Life, “and he had in the head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it.”

Another explanation of the failure of “Hobbesian” to convey the menace it might is, of course, a certain sweet-natured cartoonish tiger-cat who resisted his namesake’s “war of all against all.”

Machiavelli, & civil disobedience

Mistrust, suspicion, refusal to really listen to others: these are symptomatic features of the world as Machiavelli (and Hobbes, coming next) knew it, a world full of testimonial injustice. Not to mention intrigue, plot, war, and violence. The more things change...

Niccolo Machiavelli praised virtu’ in a leader: manliness and valor are euphemistic translations, ruthless efficiency might be more to the point. The intended implication of "manly" is not so much machismo as hu-manity, with a twist. Machiavelli's manly prince judiciously wields and conceals the guile of the fox and the brutality of the lion, all the while brandishing an image of kindhearted wisdom. A wise prince, he said, does whatever it takes to serve the public interest as he sees it. But does he see it aright? Hard to tell, if you can’t believe a word he says. But Skinner and others think he's gotten a bad name unfairly. (See videos below.)

A new detective mystery starring Nicco has recently been published, btw, and was featured on NPR. “What would happen if two of the biggest names of the Renaissance — Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci — teamed up as a crime-fighting duo?” Beats me, may have to read The Malice of Fortune. One of our groups, I think, is doing a midterm report on Superheroes & Villains. Room for one more?

I'm a bit puzzled by the sentimental fondness some seem to feel for "machiavellian" politicians. Haven't we had enough of those? Wouldn't we rather be led by Ciceronians and Senecans and Roosevelts, evincing qualities of compassion and (relative) transparency? Don't we wish them to affirm and work for the goals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor's great post-White House achievememt?

But, Bertie Russell agrees that Machiavelli has been ill-served by invidious judgments that assimilate him to our time's conventions and accordingly find him objectionable, instead of appreciating his fitness to live and serve in his own day. Russell praises his lack of "humbug." Give the devil his due.

“I never say what I believe and I never believe what I say,” declared Machiavelli. “If I sometimes say the truth, I conceal it among lies”... more»

Hobbes

“Hobbes was fond of his dram,” sang the Pythons. But he was fonder of his stick. His walking stick. (See below.)

I was amused when my old friend said he’d just spent five weeks in Britain and came away with nothing more philosophical than a visit to a castle where Hobbes had tutored. My colleague answered rightly by noting that an ancient English castle’s more likely to stimulate the philosophical imagination than is a dusty library in Tennessee. But in any event, Hobbes is a fascinating and over-maligned figure whose steps I look forward to tracking. As I wrote for students awhile back,

Thomas Hobbes is one of my favorite “authoritarians”: a walker who kept an inkwell in his walking stick, he lived to 91 in the 17th century and believed humans could be saved from themselves with the right kind of contract. Contrary to a student essay I once graded, he did not say pre-social contract humans were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes did say that’s what it would be like to live in a “state of nature,” without civil authority or police or government to keep the peace and impose order. It would be a “war of all against all.” If you don’t agree, asks Nigel Warburton in his Little History, why do you lock your doors? 

Not, surely, because you think everyone’s out to get you. But it only takes a few miscreants, doesn’t it, to create an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust?

I’d like to think Hobbes might reconsider the extremity of his position, were he transported to our time. On the other hand, we might reconsider the benignity of ours, were we transported to his. Those were tough times: civil war, a king executed, murderous politics, etc. How much freedom would you trade for peace and safety, if there were no other way to  secure it? How much have you? How secure do you feel? Still relevant questions in our time, and Hobbes’s answers were extreme indeed. But he was no monster, he was a peace-seeker and a civilizer. Most walkers are.

But, would life in a state of nature really be as bad as Hobbes thought? Most of us find most people less than totally distrustful, hostile, aggressive, and  vicious, most of the time. On the other hand, we’re most of us hardly “noble savages” either. Civilization and its discontent-engendering institutions account for a percentage of everyday bad behavior, but surely not all of it.

The Hobbesian threat of insecurity and fear of violent death, in our time, may be great enough for most people to override their desire for personal freedom. Is safety more important than liberty? “Better red (or whatever) than dead?” Better to have government snoops monitoring your calls, emails, etc., than… than what, exactly?

Even if you agree with Hobbes that humans left to themselves would revert to base, aggressive, instinctive behavior, you may still also hesitate to agree that the only corrective for this condition is an all-powerful and authoritative central state. You may prefer not to concede the mechanistic, material model of humans as incapable of changing, of choosing to become more kind and compassionate, less fearful and selfish. You may hold out for a species capable of rewriting its default programming.

Speculations about human nature as inherently good or bad have always slighted the individuality of persons, absorbing it in abstractions about universal nature. We should seek instead to grasp the particularity of our separate natures. Our separate plural natures.

“Common sense” gets things wrong often enough and egregiously enough – the flatness of earth, the rectitude of slavery, etc.? – to give serious pause. Uncommon sense is in shorter supply, and greater demand.

Finally today: Descartes’ dreams of reality and appearance, and ours. Mine are not usually so lucid, but others say otherwise of theirs. Is it really possible to alter the “real world” by controlling your dreams? I’m skeptical.

And can someone please explain “Inception” to me?