A word about Robert Filmer. His name makes an occasional appearance in this blog, mostly in contexts in which I'm warning about abuse of, or excessive claims for, supreme executive power. I noticed years ago that many libertarians invoke Thomas Hobbes in contexts like that. The dangerous proposed new regulation or evidentiary privilege is "Hobbesian," gasps the writer. I generally agreed that it -- whatever had provoked this outburst on a given day -- is a bad thing, but I grew tired of the ritual invocations of Hobbes there, especially where they didn't fit all that well. After all, Hobbes was a very secular thinker. He was wary of religion because in his own lifetime he had seen religious fervor lead to an open challenge to the sovereign, and he had seen THAT challenge lead to a civil war that must have looked a bit like a war of "all against all" to him. He was a member of the Church of England, but he clearly explained that he was so because his ...
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This coming Tuesday is Election Day. As a philosophical matter, I'm torn. In general the anarchistic thing to do is to refrain from voting thus refusing to give The System one's consent. I think a case could be made that Trump is sufficiently evil, sufficiently bent upon the consolidation of power on a Filmeresque scale (though I'd give very good odds that our 'stable genius' has no idea who Filmer was -- he doesn't have to), that going to your polling place and voting for the most feasible anti-Trump names on the list makes sense. Bottom line: I don't care whether you vote, dear reader. But if you vote, please don't vote for anyone who has ever been photographed wearing a MAGA hat. This has been my PSA.
With no small content I read Mr. Hobbes’ book De Cive , and his Leviathan , about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know hath so amply and judiciously handled. I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it. It may seem strange that I should praise his building and yet mislike his foundation, but so it is. That was Robert Filmer, the divine-right-of-kings theorist, apologist for the whims of the Stuart family. I take the quote from Yves Charles Zarka's book about Hobbes, newly translated into English by James Griffith. Griffith also contributes an introduction, stressing that though Leo Strauss is "to some degree an ally of Zarka's in the argument against historicism, they are not involved in identical projects." I have a full review of Zarka's book in a forthcoming issue of The Federal Lawyer. I go into more particulars about the Filmer/Hobbes contrast there, as ...