The Leviathan State: 1651-2013

The idea that people can live under government and be free is, as he [Hobbes] points out, ridiculous. To talk of a "free subject" is just as illogical "as if a man should talk to be of a round quadrangle."

~ John Carey, commentary on "Leviathan"

Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal.

~ Ronald Reagan

TRENDING: Major state passes bill to control gas prices

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) lived in tumultuous times. "Leviathan" was written during the brutal English Civil War (1642-1651), a war that was like the American Civil War to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a traumatic event that completely changed his worldview from theism to atheism and perverted his political thinking and writings making Hobbes value peace and constancy above God, truth and liberty. Therefore, Leviathan argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign.

In his magnum opus, "Leviathan" (1651), Hobbes begins from first principles. All men are selfish. Selfishness is man's base nature, according to Hobbes, and controls everything he does. Even if on the surface he seems selfless, humorous or altruistic, nevertheless, his motives are selfish, namely "to gain the reputation of charity of magnanimity, or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion."

Mankind's selfish nature, Hobbes argues, means that if there were no law and no government, men would be eternally in a state of war, or, as Hobbes famously wrote in "De Cive" and "Leviathan," Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all" or each against all.

Hobbes further writes: "In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, no use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and that which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Hobbes' "Leviathan" therefore establishes that it is as natural for man to live in a primitive, lawless state as it is natural for him not to. Hobbes seems to admit that laws and government are not natural to humanity, because primitive man in his state of existential war were without them. To maintain peace and security, then, humanity must create a social contract and collectively agree to be bound to a government, a commonwealth ruled by an absolute sovereign, which is a scientific consequence of human nature.

The notion that people can be ruled by governments of men and be free is, Hobbes repeatedly contends, impossible. To talk of a "free subject" is just as illogical "as if a man should talk to be of a round quadrangle. ... I should not say he were in error, but that his words were without meaning, that is to say, absurd." Likewise, the belief that we are capable of freely determining what is right or wrong or that we have some metaphysical moral duty to God to obey our consciences is equally repugnant to Hobbesian philosophy.

It can be logically argued that last Tuesday's election results where the Democratic Socialist Party (Terry McAuliffe) won the Virginia governor's race over conservative Ken Cuccinelli and Obama winning two national elections over the Judeo-Christian conservative values of the GOP in effect is the triumph of Hobbesian totalitarianism (fascism) advocated in his "Leviathan." As with all socialist states (e.g., Lenin/Stalin International Socialism, Mussolini's State Socialism, Hitler's National Socialism and American/European Democratic Socialism) one authority alone is permissible within the Hobbesian state. What Nietzsche called the "slave morality" of Christianity or as Hobbes called a second, "spiritual" authority (e.g., the Christian church) cannot be allowed to effect public policy, which is why the left always worships the idea of separation of church and state.

While Hobbes makes respectful references to God throughout his treatise, he frequently ridicules the idea of a spiritual dominion beyond the reach of the state and the law. To believe in this, he insists, is like believing in "a Kingdom of Fairies, in the dark." For the church to pretend it has contact to such a "higher" realm and can consequently arguably defeat the dictates of the all-powerful State is to "set up a supremacy against the sovereignty." Doesn't this sound just like today's socialists, progressives and postmodernists who war incessantly against America's original Judeo-Christian traditions?

Paul Hutchinson, in his 1945 book, "The New Leviathan," had this warning against liberal fascism for our age as the Allied Powers defeated the Axis Powers at the end of World War II: "The essence of this totalitarian threat, as it presents itself in the Western democracies, lies in the increasing tendency to look to the state for the ordering of all life and every life. In thus turning to the state, man is of course seeking security. But the cost is slavery."

Likewise, for Hobbes the State alone has the sovereign right to proclaim what is right and wrong. "Sin is nothing but the transgression of the law [State]." Good simply means getting whatever you want, and Evil is anything that might stand in your way of getting it. Therefore, private morality is an illusion – a belief running from Hobbes' "Leviathan" to Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre, the Jacobins and the French Revolution, through the 19th century Age of Evolution, atheism, progressivism, socialism, secular humanism, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Freidrich Nietzsche, William James, to the apotheosis of 20th century tyrants who aggressively and proudly championed liberal fascism: Presidents Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ and Barack Obama.

All of these ideas, people and the revolutions and wars they ignited in some measure owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Hobbes and to the reactionary ideas contained in his malevolent treatise "Leviathan," which deifies our carnal desires, wants, needs, privileges and transfigures them into the secular-humanist language of the "Rights of Man" – which, upon closer inspection, always devolves into unquestioned slavery to the God-State.

Obamacare is just the latest policy manifestation of socialist slavery.