Ep 51 Keith Preston on whether Thomas Hobbes is right about the necessity state.

The mindcrime liberty show is joined by Keith Preston to discuss whether Thomas Hobbes, the author of the leviathan, is right about the necessity of the state. Is it true that without the state/leviathan humans life would be short, brute and nasty?  What would an anarchist criticism of Thomas Hobbes leviathan be?  How does Thomas Hobbes differ with his rejection of natural telelogy.  What does Thomas Hobbes share and differ with other thinks like Carl Schmitt and Max Stirner both of which Keith Preston has written at length about in his great book Thinkers Against Modernity (and other works).  What would Thomas Hobbes think of dictators like Pinochet or Franco.  Would Thomas Hobbes be more of an anarchist considering the size and scale of the current national state as well as the increasingly growing international system in the past few decades.   Would Hobbes be a "liberal Hobbesian" and advocate an international global government of some kind which so many Hobbesian arguments seem to implicitly or explicitly infer.  Keith Preston also explains why nationalists already have one foot in the door towards the anarchist camp considering existing nation states are in a position of international anarchy as described by most political scientists. Finally what exactly is the peace which Hobbes describes considering that many "liberal" societies have large prison populations and of course many illiberal societies have done mass killings which thinkers like Hummel argue have killed at least 270 million people (and arguably more).     Keith Preston is the author of many books and can be found at attackthesystem.com. 

 

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