Mindful
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #1
I have long described myself as a classical liberal in the English mould, and it seems that there is no denying that the ill-founded assumptions of liberalism have allowed subversive elements to warp liberal doctrines beyond sense or use. I think it is worth outlining these false assumptions in order to understand better why liberalism as an ideology is colliding with progressive icebergs.
Without addressing the legitimate issues with these assumptions, it seems to me that liberalism as a philosophy will forever be vulnerable to having these false assumptions and contradictions exploited in ways not intended by liberal theorists.
1:
Pre-Social Man in the State of Nature
Liberal theory is predicated on the concept of man in a “state of nature.” Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and doubtless others considered this state of nature to be a possible theoretical state in which mankind was dispersed in the wilderness, living off the land and fighting with wild animals, and only occasionally encountering other humans. The disposition of the thinker informed the way that they interpreted how this would play out.
Pre-liberal philosophers Grotius and Hobbes took a myopic (and more realistic) view of what a man’s life would be like in the state of nature; they would be “brutes” as described by Grotius, and their lives would be, as famously formulated by Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Each man was engaged in an animalistic war of all against all, until he “divests himself of liberty” by entering into a society and thereby creating the “state of peace” that the social contract provides.
Without addressing the legitimate issues with these assumptions, it seems to me that liberalism as a philosophy will forever be vulnerable to having these false assumptions and contradictions exploited in ways not intended by liberal theorists.
1:
Pre-Social Man in the State of Nature
Liberal theory is predicated on the concept of man in a “state of nature.” Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and doubtless others considered this state of nature to be a possible theoretical state in which mankind was dispersed in the wilderness, living off the land and fighting with wild animals, and only occasionally encountering other humans. The disposition of the thinker informed the way that they interpreted how this would play out.
Pre-liberal philosophers Grotius and Hobbes took a myopic (and more realistic) view of what a man’s life would be like in the state of nature; they would be “brutes” as described by Grotius, and their lives would be, as famously formulated by Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Each man was engaged in an animalistic war of all against all, until he “divests himself of liberty” by entering into a society and thereby creating the “state of peace” that the social contract provides.
