The P. who hated Jazz part two

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

I'll have to take your words for it. My knowledge of Hobbes is
inadequate.

respectfully

In a message dated 5/17/2003 9:15:14 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
lycidas2 at earthlink.net writes:


> Where are today's Hitlers & Stalins, ...? 
> 
> Certainly not Bush and Blair. 
> 
> As P suggests, they are acting more like Churchill.  
> 
> Blicero? 
> 
> Vond? 
> 
> Oh come now. 
> 
> Saddam? 
> 
> When Orwell was writing nothing essential had changed in the basic
> characteristics of the European political-religious symbolism since the
> 17th century. 
> 
> Hierarchy and orders, universal and particular ecclesia, the empire of
> God and of Satan, 
> Führertum and apocalypse, were still the expressive forms of the
> communal religion.  But, the contents were gradually changing away from
> the horror of those traced out in Leviathan.  The Leviathan, the
> omnipotent state immediately under God and acting upon divine orders.
> How Hobbes constructs such a symbol is important  and involves two
> steps: First, a natural construction of the personality of the state,
> which is to be binding for all times, and then the construction of the
> natural unity as one Christian ecclesia on the historical circumstances
> of the 17th century. 
> 
> (H took the image of the Leviathan from the Bible. The monster is
> described in Job 40 and 41 "His heart is firm as a rock, firm as the
> nether millstone. WHen he raises himself, strong men take fright,
> bewildered at the lashings of his tail. Sword or spear, dagger or
> javelin, if the touch him, they have no effect" He has no equal on
> earth; for he is made quite without fear. He looks down on all
> creatures, even the highest; he is king over all proud beasts")
> 
> In order to construct the new natural unity of the political nation, H
> uses, because of the biblical tradition of the Old Covenant, contract
> theory. Men in the state of nature have committed themselves through a
> contract to place by majority vote a sovereign above themselves and to
> surrender to him. Because of this construction, H has been called a
> contract theorist. But contract only applies to an instrument of his
> theory, one that is bound to tradition and time. But the covenant
> tradition is essentially about a previously unformed multitude combining
> their multiplicity into the unity of one person; the multitude becomes
> the unit of the commonwealth in which the bearer of their personality is
> procured; the commonwealth --not the elected sovereign -- is the person
> who now appears as the actor in history. 
> 
> What Orwell witnessed was nothing less than the closing of the Christian
> ecclesia. And he identified this as the major challenge of 20th century. 
> 
> What he saw was that even though the hierarchy still extends up to God
> and the commonwealth is created according to God's commission, the
> hierarchy no longer flows down to persons who occupy the ranks of the
> ecclesia but to the collective person; it goes to the sovereign, not
> considered as the ruler of subjects, but as the personality carrier of
> the commonwealth. 
> 
> The commonwealth is a closed cosmos not only with respect to political
> power, it is also closed intellectually, because the sovereign,
> irrespective of whether he be a monarch or an assembly, has a right to
> judge which opinions and teachings are suitable to maintain and promote
> the unity of the commonwealth; he decides which people will be permitted
> to speak at assemblies, and he has the right to censor any printed
> material. The justification for this power is set out by  whatever
> minister of propaganda: The actions of the people are determined by
> their opinions, and whoever directs their opinions in the right
> direction will also direct the actions to support peace and harmony.
> Anything disrupting the peace and harmony can not be true.
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030517/e1b3f9c3/attachment.html>