Quote of the Day: Hobbes on Reason

"As oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason."

-- Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (J.C.A. Gaskin, ed., Oxford: Oxford UP 1994) (1650), p. 19.

I need to keep writing on motivated cognition so i can use this as an opening epigraph.

The Deepest Element

I finished the last set of readings for my "Elements of the Law" course today. The last excerpt was from Hobbes, which I liked. It's such a delightfully despondent note to end the class on.

UPDATE: Aw, man. Professor Strauss said he ended with Hobbes as an example of what type of argument we need to reject as lawyers. Lame, lame, lame!

Hobbes

I've always been somewhat of a Thomas Hobbes fan. Not because I agree with the need for a Leviathan state, but because I think his description of the State of Nature is pretty accurate (certainly more so than John Locke's rose-tinted glasses). In fact, my vague recollection upon reading Leviathan is that I agreed with nearly everything he wrote, save the policy implications (which, of course, is what everybody remembers).

Hobbes just rose another notch in my book when I learned today that, in his book, he questioned whether the Bible Torah was authored by Moses. This, of course, is old hat to modern Biblical scholars, who don't even think the Bible was authored by one person, but in 1651 it was pretty baller, I'd imagine.