We do be Living in a Society Tho 😳🤡
The excerpts we read by Locke, Hobbes, and Rosseau, all grapple centrally with the issue of how naturally free but unsafe humans might go about trading off their natural state for a safer but less free society. Locke and Hobbes offer opposing views on how this ought to be dealt with, while Rosseau works to clearly outline the problem without getting into specifics of solutions.
Rosseau's essay points out that for free humans to form a society that is in line with their own freedom, it must be one where everyone acts in the best interest of the whole and looks out to stop anyone who's trying to benefit themselves at the cost of the whole. The questions of how the best interest of the whole is determined or how to assure it is acted in are not delved into in Rosseau's essay, but they are what Hobbes and Locke discuss. The conundrum both acknowledge is that although, as Rosseau points out, in the long run it is in the best interest of individuals to act in the best interests of the group, people have a bad habit of taking advantage of short term benefits even when they carry severe long term consequences. This is especially an issue when, the long term being a society's entire existence, the short term is an individual's whole life.
Locke's answer to this contradiction is that a simple bit of arithmetic can deal with it. He says the trick is to realize that the best interest of society is the net sum of the interest of all the society's individuals. He goes on to outline the foundations of a three-branch democratic government with divisions to codify, interpret, and enforce the public interest according to his definition. A couple notable gripes exist with Locke's ideas here. One is more on the technical side - that it's tough to build the government he describes in practice without their being loopholes where people can abuse flaws in the execution of any of the three braches' functions to have their own personal short-term interests unfairly represented, thus causing the government to no longer be acting in the public interest. This isn't so much a point about something Locke said being wrong though, it more just says more specification is needed on how to pull his ideas off. The second critique, though, much more directly argues his ideas. It is that taking an average of everyone's private interests doesn't actually add up to the public interest. It is to say that the will of a bunch of selfish cheats can't somehow add up to something selfless and fair.
This seems to be what Hobbes believes when he proposes a monarch ought to be in charge of a nation. For one, placing one authority bestowed with objectively greater power over the masses causes there to be someone on top and deals with the otherwise unfillable power void in society. Plus, by having a monarch's power be contingent on the well-being of their nation, they will do a decent job of representing the will of the whole. There are arguments to make against Hobbes too, mostly that a monarch doesn't represent the will of the people as well as a democratic government.
As to where I stand, I don't think I know enough to have an opinion. I find Rosseau' work the least disagreeable, but I think his work also said the least, it really just articulated something that I saw the other two works as implying anyways. As to Hobbes and Locke, its tough to say.
History, at least, seems not to show much preference to Hobbes at the moment. Putting that aside though, one thing about Hobbes's work is that it seems to me that ultimately a world of monarchies just becomes a society of nations, a macro-version of Locke's society. A counterpoint to this might be that at a world-level, some higher power might step in as a "monarch," perhaps a supernatural being. One would hope then that that being truly is distinguishably unparalleled and supreme, so that the monarch system doesn't have to continue to collapse upwards, or at least that the collapsing isn't infinite and that there exists on some level a definitive "top". If there is, that's great; with the existence of a definitive highest power Hobbes's society can work out.
If not, we're back to Locke's democracy, either at a human level or some arbitrarily superhuman level. Let's say human. The trouble is that the "minor" issue I brought up with Locke's society might be more than minor. Technically, the fact that we don't yet know how to perfectly create his proposed government isn't an issue with the structure itself, but if it turns out to be impossible to build, that well might be. The question of whether we can create a world free of cheating where everyone is fairly represented seems to be one of the very nature of what it is to be human.
So left to follow either Locke's or Hobbes's guidance to answer Rosseau's question of how society should work, it seems we either need to figure out the exact nature of the human consciousness for Locke or of superhuman power for Hobbes. Some people claim to know one or both of those things and thus feel able to detail how society ought to be structured, and although I don't deny the possibility they really do, for my part I don't have any answers to the great questions of existence that I feel confident enough about to dictate the form of an ideal society based on.
Rosseau's essay points out that for free humans to form a society that is in line with their own freedom, it must be one where everyone acts in the best interest of the whole and looks out to stop anyone who's trying to benefit themselves at the cost of the whole. The questions of how the best interest of the whole is determined or how to assure it is acted in are not delved into in Rosseau's essay, but they are what Hobbes and Locke discuss. The conundrum both acknowledge is that although, as Rosseau points out, in the long run it is in the best interest of individuals to act in the best interests of the group, people have a bad habit of taking advantage of short term benefits even when they carry severe long term consequences. This is especially an issue when, the long term being a society's entire existence, the short term is an individual's whole life.
Locke's answer to this contradiction is that a simple bit of arithmetic can deal with it. He says the trick is to realize that the best interest of society is the net sum of the interest of all the society's individuals. He goes on to outline the foundations of a three-branch democratic government with divisions to codify, interpret, and enforce the public interest according to his definition. A couple notable gripes exist with Locke's ideas here. One is more on the technical side - that it's tough to build the government he describes in practice without their being loopholes where people can abuse flaws in the execution of any of the three braches' functions to have their own personal short-term interests unfairly represented, thus causing the government to no longer be acting in the public interest. This isn't so much a point about something Locke said being wrong though, it more just says more specification is needed on how to pull his ideas off. The second critique, though, much more directly argues his ideas. It is that taking an average of everyone's private interests doesn't actually add up to the public interest. It is to say that the will of a bunch of selfish cheats can't somehow add up to something selfless and fair.
This seems to be what Hobbes believes when he proposes a monarch ought to be in charge of a nation. For one, placing one authority bestowed with objectively greater power over the masses causes there to be someone on top and deals with the otherwise unfillable power void in society. Plus, by having a monarch's power be contingent on the well-being of their nation, they will do a decent job of representing the will of the whole. There are arguments to make against Hobbes too, mostly that a monarch doesn't represent the will of the people as well as a democratic government.
As to where I stand, I don't think I know enough to have an opinion. I find Rosseau' work the least disagreeable, but I think his work also said the least, it really just articulated something that I saw the other two works as implying anyways. As to Hobbes and Locke, its tough to say.
History, at least, seems not to show much preference to Hobbes at the moment. Putting that aside though, one thing about Hobbes's work is that it seems to me that ultimately a world of monarchies just becomes a society of nations, a macro-version of Locke's society. A counterpoint to this might be that at a world-level, some higher power might step in as a "monarch," perhaps a supernatural being. One would hope then that that being truly is distinguishably unparalleled and supreme, so that the monarch system doesn't have to continue to collapse upwards, or at least that the collapsing isn't infinite and that there exists on some level a definitive "top". If there is, that's great; with the existence of a definitive highest power Hobbes's society can work out.
If not, we're back to Locke's democracy, either at a human level or some arbitrarily superhuman level. Let's say human. The trouble is that the "minor" issue I brought up with Locke's society might be more than minor. Technically, the fact that we don't yet know how to perfectly create his proposed government isn't an issue with the structure itself, but if it turns out to be impossible to build, that well might be. The question of whether we can create a world free of cheating where everyone is fairly represented seems to be one of the very nature of what it is to be human.
So left to follow either Locke's or Hobbes's guidance to answer Rosseau's question of how society should work, it seems we either need to figure out the exact nature of the human consciousness for Locke or of superhuman power for Hobbes. Some people claim to know one or both of those things and thus feel able to detail how society ought to be structured, and although I don't deny the possibility they really do, for my part I don't have any answers to the great questions of existence that I feel confident enough about to dictate the form of an ideal society based on.
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