The Great Liberal Death Wish: Four Ways the Political Establishment is Failing America

History of liberalism

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Seuss' The Grinch Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Fantastic Beasts: Into the Spider-Verse Spider-Man: The high school senior is an avid thrifter developing her style through trial and error. By Isa Giallorenzo By Steve Krakow By Leor Galil By Maya Dukmasova The General Theory challenged the earlier neo-classical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. Classical economists had believed in Say's law , which simply put states that " supply creates its own demand " and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs.

An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness , i. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of " aggregate demand " and " aggregate supply " may lead to stable unemployment equilibria and in those cases it is the state and not the market that economies must depend on for their salvation. The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. In , he wrote: It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them".

Liberal feminism , the dominant tradition in feminist history , is an individualistic form of feminist theory which focuses on women's ability to maintain their equality through their own actions and choices. Liberal feminists hope to eradicate all barriers to gender equality , claiming that the continued existence of such barriers eviscerates the individual rights and freedoms ostensibly guaranteed by a liberal social order. Liberal feminists believe that "female subordination is rooted in a set of customary and legal constraints that blocks women's entrance to and success in the so-called public world".

They strive for sexual equality via political and legal reform. British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft — is widely regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism, with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman expanding the boundaries of liberalism to include women in the political structure of liberal society. Wollstonecraft "denied that women are, by nature, more pleasure seeking and pleasure giving than men. She reasoned that if they were confined to the same cages that trap women, men would develop the same flawed characters.

What Wollstonecraft most wanted for women was personhood". John Stuart Mill was also an early proponent of feminism. In his article The Subjection of Women , published , Mill attempted to prove that the legal subjugation of women is wrong and that it should give way to perfect equality. What is natural to the two sexes can only be found out by allowing both to develop and use their faculties freely". This unselfishness Mill advocated is the one "that motivates people to take into account the good of society as well as the good of the individual person or small family unit".

In his book The Subjection of Women , Mill argues that three major parts of women's lives are hindering them: Equity feminism is a form of liberal feminism discussed since the s, [] [] specifically a kind of classically liberal or libertarian feminism. The ideal of the self-made individual , who through hard work and talent could make his or her place in the world, seemed increasingly implausible. A major political reaction against the changes introduced by industrialisation and laissez-faire capitalism came from conservatives concerned about social balance, although socialism later became a more important force for change and reform.

Some Victorian writers , including Charles Dickens , Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold , became early influential critics of social injustice. New liberals began to adapt the old language of liberalism to confront these difficult circumstances, which they believed could only be resolved through a broader and more interventionist conception of the state.

An equal right to liberty could not be established merely by ensuring that individuals did not physically interfere with each other, or merely by having laws that were impartially formulated and applied. More positive and proactive measures were required to ensure that every individual would have an equal opportunity of success. John Stuart Mill contributed enormously to liberal thought by combining elements of classical liberalism with what eventually became known as the new liberalism. Mill's On Liberty addressed the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.

Mill defined " social liberty " as protection from "the tyranny of political rulers". He introduced a number of different concepts of the form tyranny can take, referred to as social tyranny and tyranny of the majority , respectively. Social liberty meant limits on the ruler's power through obtaining recognition of political liberties or rights and by the establishment of a system of " constitutional checks".

His definition of liberty, influenced by Joseph Priestley and Josiah Warren , was that the individual ought to be free to do as he wishes unless he harms others. Another early liberal convert to greater government intervention was Thomas Hill Green. Seeing the effects of alcohol, he believed that the state should foster and protect the social, political and economic environments in which individuals will have the best chance of acting according to their consciences.

The state should intervene only where there is a clear, proven and strong tendency of a liberty to enslave the individual. The New Liberalism or social liberalism movement emerged about in Britain. Hobhouse and John A.

An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers.

Hobson , saw individual liberty as something achievable only under favorable social and economic circumstances. New Liberals believed that these conditions could be ameliorated only through collective action coordinated by a strong, welfare-oriented and interventionist state.

Principles that can be described as liberal socialist have been based upon or developed by the following philosophers: Classical liberalism advocates free trade under the rule of law. Anarcho-capitalism goes one step further, with law enforcement and the courts being provided by private companies. Various theorists have espoused legal philosophies similar to anarcho-capitalism.

One of the first liberals to discuss the possibility of privatizing protection of individual liberty and property was France's Jakob Mauvillon in the 18th century. Later in the s, Julius Faucher and Gustave de Molinari advocated the same. In his essay The Production of Security , Molinari argued: Molinari and this new type of anti-state liberal grounded their reasoning on liberal ideals and classical economics.

Historian and libertarian Ralph Raico argues that what these liberal philosophers "had come up with was a form of individualist anarchism, or, as it would be called today, anarcho-capitalism or market anarchism". This society versus state idea was expressed in various ways: However, the first person to use the term anarcho-capitalism was Murray Rothbard , who in the midth century synthesized elements from the Austrian School of economics, classical liberalism and 19th-century American individualist anarchists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker while rejecting their labor theory of value and the norms they derived from it.

Anarcho-capitalists believe that in the absence of statute law by decree or legislation , society would improve itself through the discipline of the free market or what its proponents describe as a " voluntary society ". In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement , courts and all other security services would be operated by privately funded competitors rather than centrally through taxation.

Money , along with all other goods and services , would be privately and competitively provided in an open market. Therefore, personal and economic activities under anarcho-capitalism would be regulated by victim-based dispute resolution organizations under tort and contract law, rather than by statute through centrally determined punishment under political monopolies. Isolated strands of liberal thought had existed in Western philosophy since the Ancient Greeks and in Eastern philosophy since the Song and Ming period.

These ideas were first drawn together and systematized as a distinct ideology, by the English philosopher John Locke , generally regarded as the father of modern liberalism. These ideas began to coalesce at the time of the English Civil Wars. The Levellers , a radical political movement, during the war called for freedom of religion , frequent convening of parliament and equality under the law.

The impact of these ideas steadily increased during the 17th century in England , culminating in the Glorious Revolution of , which enshrined parliamentary sovereignty and the right of revolution and led to the establishment of what many consider the first modern, liberal state. This was a period of profound intellectual vitality that questioned old traditions and influenced several European monarchies throughout the 18th century.

Political tension between England and its American colonies grew after and the Seven Years' War over the issue of taxation without representation , culminating in the Declaration of Independence of a new republic, and the resulting American Revolutionary War to defend it. After the war, the leaders debated about how to move forward. The Articles of Confederation , written in , now appeared inadequate to provide security, or even a functional government. The Confederation Congress called a Constitutional Convention in , which resulted in the writing of a new Constitution of the United States establishing a federal government.

In the context of the times, the Constitution was a republican and liberal document. In Europe, liberalism has a long tradition dating back to the 17th century. The two key events that marked the triumph of liberalism were the abolition of feudalism in France on the night of 4 August , which marked the collapse of feudal and old traditional rights and privileges and restrictions as well as the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August. The development into maturity of classical liberalism took place before and after the French Revolution in Britain.

Poor whiteness and poor character

Radicals like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley saw parliamentary reform as a first step toward dealing with their many grievances, including the treatment of Protestant Dissenters , the slave trade, high prices and high taxes. In Latin America , liberal unrest dates back to the 18th century, when liberal agitation in Latin America led to independence from the imperial power of Spain and Portugal.

The new regimes were generally liberal in their political outlook and employed the philosophy of positivism , which emphasized the truth of modern science, to buttress their positions. Historian Don Doyle has argued that the Union victory in the American Civil War — gave a major boost to the course of liberalism. During 19th and early 20th century in the Ottoman Empire and Middle East, liberalism influenced periods of reform such as the Tanzimat and Al-Nahda ; the rise of secularism, constitutionalism and nationalism; and different intellectuals and religious group and movements, like the Young Ottomans and Islamic Modernism.

However, the reformist ideas and trends did not reach the common population successfully as the books, periodicals and newspapers were accessible primarily to intellectuals and segments of an emerging middle class while many Muslims saw them as foreign influences on the world of Islam. That perception complicated reformist efforts made by Middle Eastern states. This led to Islamic revivalism. Abolitionist and suffrage movements spread, along with representative and democratic ideals.

France established an enduring republic in the s. However, nationalism also spread rapidly after A mixture of liberal and nationalist sentiment in Italy and Germany brought about the unification of the two countries in the late 19th century. A liberal regime came to power in Italy and ended the secular power of the Popes. However, the Vatican launched a counter crusade against liberalism. In many countries, liberal forces responded by expelling the Jesuit order. By the end of the nineteenth century, the principles of classical liberalism were being increasingly challenged and the ideal of the self-made individual seemed increasingly implausible.

Victorian writers like Charles Dickens , Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold were early influential critics of social injustice. Liberalism gained momentum in the beginning of the 20th century. The bastion of autocracy , the Russian Tsar , was overthrown in the first phase of the Russian Revolution. The Allied victory in the First World War and the collapse of four empires seemed to mark the triumph of liberalism across the European continent, not just among the victorious allies , but also in Germany and the newly created states of Eastern Europe.

Militarism, as typified by Germany, was defeated and discredited. As Blinkhorn argues, the liberal themes were ascendant in terms of "cultural pluralism, religious and ethnic toleration, national self-determination, free market economics, representative and responsible government, free trade, unionism, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes through a new body, the League of Nations ".

In the Middle East, liberalism led to constitutional periods, like the Ottoman First and Second Constitutional Era and the Persian constitutional period , but it declined in the late s due the growth and opposition of Islamism and pan-Arab nationalism. In the United States, modern liberalism traces its history to the popular presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt , who initiated the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and won an unprecedented four elections.

The New Deal coalition established by Roosevelt left a decisive legacy and influenced many future American presidents, including John F. Economic woes prompted widespread unrest in the European political world, leading to the rise of fascism as an ideology and a movement arrayed against both liberalism and communism , especially in Nazi Germany and Italy. The Allies prevailed in the war by and their victory set the stage for the Cold War between the Communist Eastern Bloc and the liberal Western Bloc. In Iran , liberalism enjoyed wide popularity. In April , the National Front became the governing coalition when democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh , a liberal nationalist, took office as the Prime Minister.

However, his way of governing entered in conflict with Western interest and he was removed from power in a coup on 19 August The coup ended the dominance of liberalism in the country's politics. Among the various regional and national movements, the civil rights movement in the United States during the s strongly highlighted the liberal efforts for equal rights. Johnson oversaw the creation of Medicare and Medicaid , the establishment of Head Start and the Job Corps as part of the War on Poverty and the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of , an altogether rapid series of events that some historians have dubbed the "Liberal Hour".

While communist states and liberal democracies competed against one another, an economic crisis in the s inspired a move away from Keynesian economics , especially under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. This trend, called " neoliberalism " by its opponents, lasted through the s and the s. At the beginning of World War II, the number of democracies around the world was about the same as it had been forty years before. In The Spirit of Democracy , Larry Diamond argues that by "dictatorship, not democracy, was the way of the world" and that "barely a quarter of independent states chose their governments through competitive, free, and fair elections".

Diamond goes on to say that democracy bounced back and by the world was "predominantly democratic". Liberalism has drawn both criticism and support in its history from various ideological groups. Less friendly to the goals of liberalism has been conservatism. Edmund Burke , considered by some to be the first major proponent of modern conservative thought, offered a blistering critique of the French Revolution by assailing the liberal pretensions to the power of rationality and to the natural equality of all humans. Some confusion remains about the relationship between social liberalism and socialism , despite the fact that many variants of socialism distinguish themselves markedly from liberalism by opposing capitalism , hierarchy and private property.

Socialism formed as a group of related yet divergent ideologies in the 19th century such as Christian socialism , communism with the writings of Karl Marx and social anarchism with the writings of Mikhail Bakunin , the latter two influenced by the Paris Commune. These ideologies—as with liberalism and conservatism—fractured into several major and minor movements in the following decades. Vladimir Lenin stated that—in contrast with Marxism —liberal science defends wage slavery. In the same vein, conservatives have also attacked what they perceive to be the reckless liberal pursuit of progress and material gains, arguing that such preoccupations undermine traditional social values rooted in community and continuity.

Social democracy , an ideology advocating progressive modification of capitalism , emerged in the 20th century and was influenced by socialism. Broadly defined as a project that aims to correct through government reformism what it regards as the intrinsic defects of capitalism by reducing inequalities, [] social democracy was also not against the state.

Several commentators have noted strong similarities between social liberalism and social democracy, with one political scientist even calling American liberalism "bootleg social democracy" due to the absence of a significant social democratic tradition in the United States that liberals have tried to rectify. Fascists accuse liberalism of materialism and a lack of spiritual values. Scholars have praised the influence of liberal internationalism, claiming that the rise of globalisation "constitutes a triumph of the liberal vision that first appeared in the eighteenth century" while also writing that liberalism is "the only comprehensive and hopeful vision of world affairs".

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the ideology of liberalism. For local differences in its meaning, see Liberalism by country. For other uses, see Liberal disambiguation. History of liberalism Contributions to liberal theory. Democratic capitalism Liberal bias in academia. This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: Needs better presentation and content summarization Please help improve this section if you can.

May Learn how and when to remove this template message. The American Prospect , an American political magazine that backs social liberal policies Constitutional liberalism Friedrich Naumann Foundation , a global advocacy organisation that supports liberal ideas and policies The Liberal , a former British magazine dedicated to coverage of liberal politics and liberal culture Liberalism by country Muscular liberalism Orange Book liberalism Rule according to higher law. Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future Archived from the original on 7 February Retrieved 20 March Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies.

Donohue 19 December Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved 31 December Three of them — freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion — have long been fundamental to liberalism. For all three share a belief in the liberal society as defined above: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Weiss; John Woodland Welch Biblical-Judaic and Islamic Perspectives. Democracy attaches itself to a form of government: The two may agree; they are not contradictory, but they are neither identical, nor necessarily connected.

In the moral order, liberalism is the liberty to think, recognised and practiced. This is primordial liberalism, as the liberty to think is itself the first and noblest of liberties. Man would not be free in any degree or in any sphere of action, if he were not a thinking being endowed with consciousness.

The freedom of worship, the freedom of education, and the freedom of the press are derived the most directly from the freedom to think.

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans | Media | The Guardian

The First Modern Revolution. Retrieved 7 February Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries: Freedom, Liberalism and Anti-Liberalism in the 21st Century. And he frequently emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our interests are anyhow. The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or reliably selfish; and he does not think we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interests.

He is rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against self-interest: Too often, he thinks, we are too much concerned with what others think of us, or inflamed by religious doctrine, or carried away by others' inflammatory words. But we shall see that this would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account of human nature. This is Hobbes's picture of human nature. We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence.

When we act, we may do so selfishly or impulsively or in ignorance, on the basis of faulty reasoning or bad theology or others' emotive speech. Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together. The best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. The worst, on Hobbes's account, is what he calls the "natural condition of mankind," a state of violence, insecurity and constant threat. In outline, Hobbes's argument is that the alternative to government is a situation no one could reasonably wish for, and that any attempt to make government accountable to the people must undermine it, so threatening the situation of non-government that we must all wish to avoid.

John Rawls

Our only reasonable option, therefore, is a "sovereign" authority that is totally unaccountable to its subjects. Let us deal with the "natural condition" of non-government, also called the "state of nature," first of all. The state of nature is "natural" in one specific sense only. What is Hobbes's reasoning here? He claims that the only authority that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her child, because the child is so very much weaker than the mother and indebted to her for its survival.

Among adult human beings this is invariably not the case. Hobbes concedes an obvious objection, admitting that some of us are much stronger than others. And although he's very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser than others, he doesn't have much difficulty with the idea that some are fools and others are dangerously cunning.

Even the strongest must sleep; even the weakest might persuade others to help him kill another. He is strongly opposing arguments that established monarchs have a natural or God-given right to rule over us. Thus, as long as human beings have not successfully arranged some form of government, they live in Hobbes's state of nature.

But the real point for Hobbes is that a state of nature could just as well occur in seventeenth century England, should the King's authority be successfully undermined. It could occur tomorrow in every modern society, for example, if the police and army suddenly refused to do their jobs on behalf of government.

Unless some effective authority stepped into the King's place or the place of army and police and government , Hobbes argues the result is doomed to be deeply awful, nothing less than a state of war. Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible without an overarching authority?

Hobbes provides a series of powerful arguments that suggest it is extremely unlikely that human beings will live in security and peaceful cooperation without government. Anarchism , the thesis that we should live without government, of course disputes these arguments. His most basic argument is threefold.

This is a more difficult argument than it might seem. Moreover, many of these people will be prepared to use violence to attain their ends - especially if there's no government or police to stop them. In this Hobbes is surely correct. If our lives seem to be at stake, after all, we're unlikely to have many scruples about stealing a loaf of bread; if we perceive someone as a deadly threat, we may well want to attack first, while his guard is down; if we think that there are lots of potential attackers out there, it's going to make perfect sense to get a reputation as someone who shouldn't be messed with.

Underlying this most basic argument is an important consideration about insecurity. As we shall see Hobbes places great weight on contracts thus some interpreters see Hobbes as heralding a market society dominated by contractual exchanges. In particular, he often speaks of "covenants," by which he means a contract where one party performs his part of the bargain later than the other.

In the state of nature such agreements aren't going to work. Only the weakest will have good reason to perform the second part of a covenant, and then only if the stronger party is standing over them. Yet a huge amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their part of the bargain over time. A similar point can be made about property, most of which we can't carry about with us and watch over. This means we must rely on others respecting our possessions over extended periods of time.

If we can't do this, then many of the achievements of human society that involve putting hard work into land farming, building or material objects the crafts, or modern industrial production, still unknown in Hobbes's time will be near impossible. One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic duties to reciprocate fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner?

Even if there's no government providing a framework of law, judgment and punishment, don't most people have a reasonable sense of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with? Indeed, shouldn't our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the first place?

This is the crunch point of Hobbes's argument, and it is here if anywhere that one can accuse Hobbes of "pessimism. The first concerns our duties in the state of nature that is, the so-called "right of nature". The second follows from this, and is less often noticed: On Hobbes's view the right of nature is quite simple to define. Naturally speaking - that is, outside of civil society — we have a right to do whatever we think will ensure our self-preservation. The worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of others. If we have any rights at all, if as we might put it nature has given us any rights whatsoever, then the first is surely this: But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful.

We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: And this is where Hobbes's picture of humankind becomes important. Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you'll have quite a different view of things perhaps you were just stretching your arms, not raising a musket to shoot me.

Because we're all insecure, because trust is more-or-less absent, there's little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some trusted third party to decide whose judgment is right. We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally amoral. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place [in the state of nature]. Hobbes is dramatizing his point, but the core is defensible. New readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were to picture human beings with some basic moral ideas.

There are different ways of interpreting Hobbes's view of the absence of moral constraints in the state of nature. Some think that Hobbes is imagining human beings who have no idea of social interaction and therefore no ideas about right and wrong. Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human motivation, so that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state of nature.

In particular, it's historically reasonable to think that Hobbes invariably has civil war in mind, when he describes our "natural condition. The problem here isn't a lack of moral ideas - far from it — rather that moral ideas and judgments differ enormously. This means for example that two people who are fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they're perfectly entitled to the object and both think they're perfectly right to kill the other - a point Hobbes makes explicitly and often.

But what sort of "ought" is this? There are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. It might be a counsel of prudence: In this case Hobbes's advice only applies to us i if we agree that violent death is what we should fear most and should therefore avoid; and ii if we agree with Hobbes that only an unaccountable sovereign stands between human beings and the state of nature.

This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of Hobbes, but we'll see that it faces serious problems. The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either. This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature. We have a duty to do what we can to avoid this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all possible. Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral obligations.

But then two difficult questions arise: Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These principles are independent of though also complementary to whatever moral instruction we might get from God or religion. In other words, they are laws given by nature rather than revealed by God. But Hobbes makes radical changes to the content of these so-called laws of nature. He thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that religious conscience might sanction disobedience of "immoral" laws, and with Catholics who thought that the commandments of the Pope have primacy over those of national political authorities.

Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that are politically crucial.

A third, that stresses the important of keeping to contracts we have entered into, is important in Hobbes's moral justifications of obedience to the sovereign. The remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, "do as you would be done by. Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. This repeats the points we have already seen about our "right of nature," so long as peace does not appear to be a realistic prospect. The second law of nature is more complicated:.

That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of nature to civil society.

But how he does this is misleading and has generated much confusion and disagreement. The way that Hobbes describes this second law of nature makes it look as if we should all put down our weapons, give up much of our "right of nature," and jointly authorize a sovereign who will tell us what is permitted and punish us if we don't obey. But the problem is obvious. If the state of nature is anything like as bad as Hobbes has argued, then there's just no way people could ever make an agreement like this or put it into practice. But Hobbes means to defend every existing government that is powerful enough to secure peace among its subjects - not just a mythical government that's been created by a peaceful contract out of a state of nature.

His basic claim is that we should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a contract with everyone else in our society - everyone else, that is, except the sovereign authority. In Hobbes's myth of the social contract, everyone except the person or group who will wield sovereign power lays down their "right to all things. How limited this right of nature becomes in civil society has caused much dispute, because deciding what is an immediate threat is a question of judgment.

It certainly permits us to fight back if the sovereign tries to kill us. But what if the sovereign conscripts us as soldiers? What if the sovereign looks weak and we doubt whether he can continue to secure peace…? The sovereign, however, retains his or her, or their right of nature, which we have seen is effectively a right to all things - to decide what everyone else should do, to decide the rules of property, to judge disputes and so on. Hobbes concedes that there are moral limits on what sovereigns should do God might call a sovereign to account. However, since in any case of dispute the sovereign is the only rightful judge - on this earth, that is — those moral limits make no practical difference.

In every moral and political matter, the decisive question for Hobbes is always: As we have seen, in the state of nature, each of us is judge in our own cause, part of the reason why Hobbes thinks it is inevitably a state of war. Once civil society exists, the only rightful judge is the sovereign. If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual promise, then it might seem half-way plausible to think we have an obligation to obey the sovereign although even this requires the claim that promising is a moral value that overrides all others.

If we have been conquered or, more fortunately, have simply been born into a society with an established political authority, this seems quite improbable. Hobbes has to make three steps here, all of which have seemed weak to many of his readers. First of all, he insists that promises made under threat of violence are nonetheless freely made, and just as binding as any others. Second, he has to put great weight on the moral value of promise keeping, which hardly fits with the absence of duties in the state of nature.

Third, he has to give a story of how those of us born and raised in a political society have made some sort of implied promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to show that we are bound either morally or out of self-interest to behave as if we had made such a promise. In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic picture of the world, to suggest that threats of force do not deprive us of liberty.

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