the modern state as a suburban house lot

[Mark Kohut]

Hobbes tried to meet the danger by devising a civil theology that made
the order of a society in existence the truth that it represented--and
by the side of this truth no other should be held.

And one might say that TRP explores, most starkly in his California trilogy, whether America "made the order of society, the truth it represented. Lot 49= maybe, in the counterculture...VL= No...IV....the transition to NO.

--- On Thu, 10/1/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: the modern state as a suburban house lot
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, October 1, 2009, 3:52 PM
> This interested in one of Eddin's
> secondary sources may now read it
> Online. It is Eric Voegelin's Collected Works Vol.5
> Modernist Without
> Retraint: The Political Religions, The New Science of
> Politics, And
> Science, Politics, And Gnosticism.
> 
> On Page 233 Voegelin discusses Hobbes: " The function of
> Gnosticism as
> a civil theology of Western society its destruction of the
> truth of
> the soul, and its deisregard for the problem of existence
> have set
> forth in sifficient detail to make the final imporance of
> the proble
> clear.
> 
> 
> Hobbes tried to meet the danger by devising a civil
> theology that made
> the order of a society in existence the truth that it
> represented--and
> by the side of this truth no other should be held.
> 
> Fear and submit to government by contract ...(236)
> 
> The Romantic resistance, the Antinomian strain, is present,
> not only
> in the works and the histories of the Pyncheons, but in the
> Romance
> where they are characters (HSG), and of course, in the
> first chapater
> of The Scarlet Letter.
>