Sublime

Jim is what I call a rugged individualist. His brand of individualism comes straight out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment era, the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the same philosophical roots as the American Revolution and soon after that the French Revolution. Gone forever was the doctrine of the divine right of kings. It got repla

Where society has acquired a sufficient degree of stability to enable it to hold certain maxims and to retain fixed habits, the lower orders are accustomed to respect intellectual superiority and to submit to it without complaint, although they set at naught all those privileges which wealth and birth have introduced among mankind.

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Rousseau is, however, troubled by the fact that the majority of a people does not necessarily represent its most-intelligent citizens. Indeed, he agrees with Plato that most people are stupid. Thus, the general will, while always morally sound, is sometimes mistaken. Hence Rousseau suggests the people need a lawgiver—a great mind like Solon or Lycu

Hobbes’s assumption that people are incapable of coexisting without authority implies that human online interactions on news sites would benefit from signage, structure and incentives to participate in a deliberative way.

life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else. Insofar as there has been any progress from this benighted state of affairs, a Hobbesian would argue, it has been largely due to exactly thos

"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.

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