Hobbes

I can remember reading The Leviathan back in college at Madison. A yellow covered book. I fancied myself a philosophy major at the time. I got through the book & understood how just the utter weight of money & power could alter freedom, even without the philosophical underpinnings that Hobbes provided. Billmon has a long post about Bu$hCo & Leviathan. It's a good read, so, goddamnit, read it. Here are a few parts I liked. Now, go find your own.

If someone would just translate The Leviathan into modern colloquial English – or even better, turn it into a comic book – I think Shrub might discover a new favorite philosopher. Maybe not on same plane as Jesus Christ (and certainly not as politically advantageous) but a thinker even more in tune with his own ideas about the power and majesty of the unitary executive.

By Shrub’s ideas, of course, I actually mean those of the ultra-conservative legal scholars who invented the doctrine of the unitary executive and turned into our own home-grown version of the Fuhrerprinzip – now backed by the ability to process 10 billion bits of telecommunications data per second. Big Brother, eat your heart out.
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The ultimate enemy, in the Hobbesian universe, is anarchy – the dreaded war of the all against the all – in which human life is rapidly reduced to its natural state: “solitary, poor nasty, brutish and short.” Even the most ruthless repression is preferable to that horror, just as to our modern-day security fanatics any constitutional violation is justified if it reduces, even slightly, the odds of another 9/11.

Here again, Hobbes would probably line up with the GOP spin machine. He also had little patience for complaints about civil liberties, which he dismissed as simply childish misreadings of the ancient Greek and Roman political texts:

The Athenians and Romans were free, that is free Commonwealths, not that any particular men had the liberty to resist their own representative [he meant ruler] but that their representative had the liberty to resist, or invade, other people.
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But phone records, of course, are just the electronic frosting on Big Brother’s birthday cake. The NSC program is simply one of a horde of data mining organisms cloned from Admiral Poindexter’s original Total (as in totalitarian) Information Awareness program, which predates 9/11. To protect the program from Congress’s feeble attempts to kill it, Rumsfeld apparently broke it down and shipped the pieces to other provinces in his empire, with the NSC (not surprisingly) inheriting the core functions. (When Rumsfeld jotted down that note on 9/11, reminding himself to “sweep it all up; things related and not,” we should have realized he was speaking literally.)
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Leviathan, in other words, is almost free of any restraint, save the arbitrary limits – such as they may be – set by the Cheney administration or, perhaps more importantly, by custom and habit. The creature doesn’t know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn’t tried to do them yet. But it’s starting to figure this out, and it’s going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down. Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast, Leviathan’s subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly.