Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"[For Hobbes] the state is charged with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy... Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous." -- Patrick Deneed, Why Liberalism Failed , 32 Proto-liberals like Locke and Jefferson and modern liberals like Mises and Rawls all start from a similar place: we are first and foremost human atoms, who only need enter into social groups in so far as it suits our interest to do so. Our original state was as free individuals, who "contracted" into social groups because we saw it was to our advantage. As Deneen notes, "Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision..." (33). Or, as Mises put it: "The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart human cooperation. "Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and p...

"No one is more emphatic then Locke in opposing what is real to what we 'make for ourselves,' the work of nature to the work of mind. Simple ideas or sensations we certainly do not 'make for ourselves.' They therefore and the matter supposed to cause them are, according to Locke, real. But relations are neither simple ideas nor their material archetypes. They therefore, as Locke explicitly holds, fall under the head of the work of the mind, which is opposed to the real. But if we take him at his word and exclude from what we have considered real all qualities constituted by relation, we find that none are left. Without relation any simple idea would be undistinguished from other simple ideas, undetermined by its surroundings in the cosmos of experience. It would thus be unqualified itself, and consequently could afford no qualification of the material archetype, which yet according to Locke we only know through it or, if otherwise, as the subject of those 'pri...

I just heard the above line in a TV show, and it made me think of the false anthropology of Lockean liberalism* that lies behind it. (We, the audience, were to suppose that if the teenager who was the "she" in the quote "wanted other things" then, gosh darn it, she should have gotten them!) The false anthropology of Lockean liberalism pictures human beings as atomic bundles of "wants" or "preferences." The "good life" consists in satisfying as many of those wants as possible. The only limit on the number of these wants that should be satisfied arises from the fact that at some point, my attempt to satisfy one of my wants may collide with your attempt to satisfy one of yours. And the role of government in this liberal understanding is to soften the force of those collisions to whatever extent is possible. (This is true of all Lockean-liberal proposals for governance, from Rawls on the left through to Rothbard on the right.) The fals...

"Here [in Galileo] the character of the mind-dependent or merely phenomenal character of secondary qualities, as taught by Locke, is already full-grown. English students of philosophy, finding this doctrine in Locke, do not always realize that it is by no means an invention of his, but had been long ago taught by Galileo as an important truth, and was in fact one of the leading principles of the whole scientific movement of the preceding two centuries; and that by the time it reaches Locke it is already somewhat out of date, and ready to collapse at the first touch of Berkeley's finger." -- R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature , p. 102

In English political thought, from Thomas More to the American Revolution That's the working title of my next book. The theme explored is the historical development of what constitutes legitimate political authority, and when existing authority can be overthrown. Since this is a period that began with a dynasty put on the throne in a coup, and saw a civil war and two revolutions, these questions were often at the forefront of men's minds, and they were given serious attention. At present, my list of thinkers to address includes (updated to include recommendations from the comments): Thomas More William Shakespeare Richard Hooker George Buchanan Charles I John Milton Oliver Cromwell John Lilburne Thomas Hobbes Robert Filmer Algernon Sydney John Locke George Berkeley David Hume Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine Edmund Burke Who have I left off the list?