For this semester I’ll offer my reflections on an introductory, freshmen-level course on western core texts that I am teaching. It is difficult for a person today to think of a citizen’s relationship to government other than being a social contract, such is the powerful hold that Hobbes and Locke have over us. Social contract theory is simply individuals consenting to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to authority in exchange for the state to protect their remaining rights and maintain social order. Both Hobbes and Locke begin their social contract theories by examining the human condition absent of any political order, which they call the “state of nature.” To use Locke’s words, it is a state of “perfect freedom” and “equity” where individuals can act and dispose of their possessions as they see fit and where everyone exists equally without one another “without subordination or subjugation.”
Fascinating and timely. I know it’s off your map but Desmond’s reflections on the Intimate Universal, referenced in my essays on poetics, supplies what you are looking for. But today’s culture of autonomy is irreconcilable with metaxical existence. Our current civil war, erupting from repressed white supremacy, must run its course. A new minority majority will take time to form. Pluralism, essential to metaxical thinking, is inevitable if Hobbes’s war is to be replaced by peace.
Fascinating and timely. I know it’s off your map but Desmond’s reflections on the Intimate Universal, referenced in my essays on poetics, supplies what you are looking for. But today’s culture of autonomy is irreconcilable with metaxical existence. Our current civil war, erupting from repressed white supremacy, must run its course. A new minority majority will take time to form. Pluralism, essential to metaxical thinking, is inevitable if Hobbes’s war is to be replaced by peace.