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To: G. Stolyarov II
Why don't you try substituting "the people" for the monarch in Hobbes' political equations and see what you end up with. You might find that the result looks almost precisely like the original United States of America.

Hobbes wasn't perfect, but his ideas are shown by history to be a far more accurate description of the human condition than Locke's baseless idealism. If Locke was correct with regards to the natural state of man, then why haven't libertarian governments spontaneously evolved everywhere throughout human history? The answer to that is because if they did then they were conquered and destroyed by a Hobbesian nation, thus demonstrating the superiority of Hobbes' view of the state of nature.

Locke's view of the state of nature simply doesn't work in the real world. It is foolishly naive and any society that adopted a strict Lockean view would perish.
155 posted on 12/30/2003 8:50:09 PM PST by thoughtomator ("I will do whatever the Americans want because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid"-Qadafi)
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To: thoughtomator
Locke in fact had written thoroughly on the subject of self-defense and how men under a government of his construction would exercise it. And, as Rand and other philosophers have subsequently demonstrated, a libertarian society's government has the orchestrated defense of its constituents as its prime and sole aim, therefore becoming specialized and extremely efficient at it.

See "A Lockean Discourse on Self-Defense, Punishment, and Justice" for Locke's words and some analysis of them.

http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/lockeandiscourse.html

Hobbes' Leviathan represents the modern, not the original, United States, a gargantuan welfare state where the will of "the people" is permitted to dispose of the life and fate of the individual against his consent, thereby infringing on individuals' rights to exist for their own sake.

I shall be signing off for the night, but I do not resign from this discussion. Tomorrow, I shall respond further.
160 posted on 12/30/2003 8:57:15 PM PST by G. Stolyarov II (http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/index19.html)
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To: thoughtomator
The answer to that is because if they did then they were conquered and destroyed by a Hobbesian nation, thus demonstrating the superiority of Hobbes' view of the state of nature.

Only for rather narrow definitions of "superior".

168 posted on 12/30/2003 9:46:53 PM PST by tortoise (All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.)
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