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Comment by allturtles | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, why is this troubling, can you explain?

In short, it is one of the most influential books on humans being inherently bad and needing force to be otherwise. To take just the top of the Wikipedia article [0]:

"The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), it argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes wrote that civil war and the brute situation of a state of nature ("the war of all against all") could be avoided only by strong, undivided government."

The fact that this is the most assigned book at the "elite" institutions, and these are the people that end up in positions of corporate and government power, is troubling because of the philosophy that comes from this and what they feel they should do as power holders. Not to say this work isn't taught critically in universities or having some counterpoints elsewhere on this list, but it is still clearly influential and very much the way power is wielded.

(Edit: for context, I read Leviathan at one of those universities as a student. It is still a bedrock of political philosophy.)

(Edit 2: and no, please don't take this comment as some argument for "small government," it is not that at all)

To me, Leviathan’s war-of-all-against-all fable is a metaphor for the practical reality of competing political interests. Taking it literally isn’t Hobbes’ point.

Hobbes’ point is that the sole job of the sovereign is to keep the peace and that is the only criterion for judging it. As personal political practice this is hard and that hardness — the hardness of not judging the sovereign by “what is in it for me” — is what makes Leviathan philosophy. What gives it heft is what we do today not whichever explanatory fiction or “farcical aquatic ceremonies” we believe brought us here.

Moreover Hobbes sets a clear moral criterion for voiding individual obligation to the sovereign...being led to the gallows. The social contract does not obligate our lives to the sovereign. This is still a radical departure from ordinary practice. The individual is not morally bound to accept the sovereign’s punishments even if those punishments are how the sovereign must keep the peace.

I don’t think Hobbes’ view of the state of nature has much to do with why it’s taught at all, nor do I think it is the main thing students takeaway from the book. Most of these schools are also going to emphasize that Hobbes lived during a time of civil war and intense strife.

It’s the foundational and most coherent argument for the social contract that would eventually come to define liberal democracy. I don’t think students are reading this thinking they need to “wield power.” That’s pretty disingenuous and is seems like unsubstantiated anti-elitism. Almost everyone disagrees with Hobbes’ conclusion, but understanding where exactly his argument breaks down gives very good insight into the theoretical underpinnings of western democracy.

I don't think the Leviathan is taught for the conclusions; it's taught because it established the modern framework for political science discourse; the terms of debate, so to speak. While the debate is far more sophisticated today, the emphasis on security, conflict, selfishness, and property is as strong as ever. That itself is somewhat unfortunate, but on the plus side on the list of most assigned at Ivy Leagues is #2 Imagined Communities, and #3 Republic.

Regarding Imagined Communities, I can't think of any better text for introducing alternative dimensions for understanding political systems. It's not critical, but constructive; not abstract, but concrete; not idealistic, radical, or predictive, but powerfully descriptive. You have to teach Hobbes because without it, it's not possible (or at least not easy) to orient oneself in the sea of modern Western political philosophy. Imagined Communities is just smart and an unsung seminal piece of political science literature. I had no idea it had become so popular.

I think you are overthinking it. The point of the book isn't that people are evil. The point of the book is that coordination and trust issues are hard - and the best way (in his view) to resolve these issues without constant violence is to have a state that is trusted to adjudicate these differences.

The comments below raise some good points, I'm not going to argue against that. Still, it is remarkable the difference in the Ivy and Public reading lists no? The structure of most societies and power hierarchy I think is still very much in that Hobbesian legacy. As a note, I didn't read Imagined Communities, I will have to take a look. We read the classic counterpoint, Rousseau.

I didn't mean this to sound anti-elitist (after all, I went to those very same institutions and still run in that world), but nonetheless there is a huge disparity in the opportunities available and where students end up coming out of these places. That their reading lists differ so much from the majority of college students is something worth investigating, at the very least to see what can be improved in any educational trajectory.

I think the distinction between public and ivy here may be data noise. If you scroll down to the chart that compares ivies and public by subject, you'll see that in political science courses, Leviathan is the most assigned book in both public and elite colleges, but there are ~250 instances for ivy and < 100 for public. So for some reason there are lots more political science syllabi in the Ivy data set than the public one, which would skew the overall results.

TBH, though, I can't really make any sense of this data. The overall result says that Leviathan appears just over 200 times overall at Ivies (i.e. fewer times than in Ivy poli sci syllabi). And for most assigned business books, "Asking the Right Questions" appears 450 times, which should put it at the top overall, but it doesn't appear in the top 10.

Hmm...interesting. I'm not sure how the data reflects things like a core curriculum (where I read a lot of these) which is a general requirement...or maybe looks at the classes themselves which may be in one department or another. This could be further confused with common requirements being taught by professors in different fields, and so their syllabi might be classified differently? Curious.

Edit: the best way to investigate would be if it is all weighted by number of students or something, though that might be tough to do.

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