There’s a nice, long, fascinating article in The Nation on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes. The writer, Corey Robin, discusses the view posited in Quentin Skinner’s book Hobbes and Republican Liberty that Hobbes was the first counter-revolutionary. What does he mean by that? As he says, the English Civil War of the 1640s, often thought of as a revolution, was not a revolution at all, so what was there to be counter to? Well, Hobbes did think of it as a revolution, in the slightly antiquated sense that the ancients used the word—the cyclical change of a political system. (As an aside, that must surely be the origin of the modern political sense of the word, since when real revolutions started popping up, the word picked up new baggage.) The “revolutionaries” of the time were aiming for a republican system of government, and Hobbes was avowedly against such a thing. Where Hobbes’s genius lay, though, was in coming up with arguments against it that were not utterly terrible. [Read more →]