POL200Y1 Lecture : LEVAITHAN CHAPTER 1-7
Document Summary
Tag end of jewish holiday reminders: lecture posting, office hours. Hobbes vs. machiavelli: the least favorite/most favorite writers in the course, according to student evaluations. I"ve never understood this, i always love studying and teaching. Hobbes; perhaps i"d be more successful at teaching him if i did understand it. Hobbes is a bracing presence, the intellectual equivalent of those cold winds that so often whistle through toronto at the season when we study him, just as they"re doing tonight. His arguments may make us uncomfortable, like those winds, but like then too they will wake us up. Now there seem to be two main reasons why students have trouble with hobbes: (1) He"s written in english (but not quite our english, into which the other writers have been translated). And a strange twist to the familiar conclusion: a liberal argument for despotism. Hobbes achieves the democratization of machiavelli, and therefore his domestication.
