How the false scent of consent led us astray
As in so much else, it was in the 17th century when things began to go seriously astray. The 17th century had its tremendous triumphs, but in a way these are the very source of the problems it bequeathed us. Like a childhood prodigy who achieves tremendous success early in one subject, and therefore comes to believe he is good at everything and has nothing to learn from his elders, 17th-century thinkers took the advances being made in physics in their time as evidence that the solution to all human problems was at hand, and only required employing the same approach that had advanced physics to everything. Atomism was in the air, and was naturally carried over to social thought by understanding individual human beings as analogous to physical atoms. But what would bind these atoms together into a society? Since it was not completely forgotten that these were moral atoms, consent seemed a plausible candidate. And so in Hobbes, Locke, and the American founders we get the notion that a...