Tag: Thomas Hobbes

Jean Delville, The Last Idols, 1931

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The following dialogue is based on a conversation I had recently with a self-described political “realist.”

The Realist: I’m sick of ideological debates. We don’t need the perfect ideology. We just need power.

GJ: I don’t have any interest in political ideas that don’t lead to power. I am interested in political ideologies because that’s how we get power. Even if you think you are going to get a hundred guys in rubber rafts and seize control of a tiny island in the Caribbean, you’re going to have to be on the same page with them about what you are doing and why. (more…)

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Agustina S. Paglaya
Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024

Why did societies establish mass education systems? Did democratic regimes produce schools to raise up informed and engaged citizens? Or perhaps, as libertarian writers like John Taylor Gatto propose, scheming businessmen endorsed compulsory education to craft a population of obedient, unthinking workers. (more…)

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We live in an age when ordinary standards of civility have collapsed yet somehow there is universal agreement that even morons and criminals deserve to be treated with “respect.” We are urged to extend respect even to other species and the planet as a whole. Sometimes self-respect is enjoined upon us. Within my experience, the most common such injunction is addressed to men, who exhorted ad nauseam to respect women. (more…)

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Thomas Hobbes

(English version here)

Майк Максвелл задал мне несколько вопросов о суверенитете и международном порядке в статье Imperium Press.

Этнонационалисты представляют себе мир, состоящий из суверенных родных земель для всех отдельных народов, стремящихся к автономии. Таким образом, мы выступаем против многонациональных империй, а также схем глобального правительства, все из которых подразумевают отказ в суверенитете отдельным народам или, в случае глобального управления, всем народам. (more…)

Thomas Hobbes

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(Russian version here)

Mike Maxwell has posed some questions to me on sovereignty and international order on the Imperium Press Substack.

Ethnonationalists envision a world of sovereign homelands for all distinct peoples who aspire to autonomy. Thus we are opposed to multinational empires as well as global government schemes, all of which involve the denial of sovereignty to particular peoples or, in the case of global governance, to all peoples. (more…)

The Blood Compact Monument in the Philippines, which commemorates the blood compact between that country and Spain that was made in 1565.

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Most classical liberal thinking, which is still ultimately liberal and thus subversive, is based on the idea of the Lockean social contract. But what if the idea of a social contract is a complete farce? Given that classical liberalism underpins much of lukewarm conservatism, if we knock out the idea of social contracts, we also knock out conservatism. (more…)

Thomas Hobbes

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“Can’t we all just get along?” — Rodney King

“[M]en have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deal of grief) in keeping company, where there is no power to over-awe them all.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes. For anyone who has a serious interest in fathoming the depths of human nature as it relates to the engagement with political power and the sources of human conflict, reading Thomas Hobbes is an exhilarating experience. (more…)

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.

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Stephen Paul Foster
After Harry Met Sally: A Novel of Philosophical Discovery 
Independently published, 2021

I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain. — Fleetwood Mac, “The Chain”

Readers who enjoyed last year’s Toward the Bad I Kept on Turning: A Confessional Novel — as I did here[1] — will have their winters brightened by news that it now has something of a sequel; which is to say, how it functions as a sequel is left to the reader as a pleasant discovery. (more…)

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In the fall of 2000, I taught an adult education class entitled Philosophy on Film, where we discussed The Matrix, American Beauty, Ground Hog Day, Network, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Gattaca, and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

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As the Chinese “silent invasion” of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada continues, you may want to learn something about the Western academics who lay the intellectual groundwork for this invasion. In a prior article, “The Transcendental Mind of Europeans Stands Above the Embedded Mind of Asians,” we met two influential scholars calling upon whites to abandon their “failed” attempts to formulate transcendental truths for the sake of the more “profound” contextual approach of Chinese philosophers with their demonstration that all thinking is “embedded” to a time and a place. (more…)

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Matthew Crawford
The World Beyond Your Head
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016

Matthew Crawford is a new but powerful intellectual. His debut in the public sphere began in 2009 with his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which was affectionately dubbed “Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Slate, and positively reviewed by Francis Fukuyama. Crawford’s second polemic, however, is more far-reaching, and stands to supplant his first work as his philosophical masterpiece. (more…)

Carl Schmitt, 1888–1985

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Before World War II liberal rights were understood among Western states in a libertarian and ethno-nationalistic way. Freedom of association, for example, was understood to include the right to refuse to associate with certain members of certain ethnic groups, even the right to discriminate in employment practices. This racial liberalism was still institutionalized right up until the 1960s. The settler nations of Australia, Canada, United States, and New Zealand enjoyed admission and naturalization policies based on race and culture, intended to keep these nations “White.”

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Editor’s Note:

Since humor is one of the New Right’s most powerful weapons, we should welcome anything that might sharpen our attack, including a theoretical explanation of the nature of humor itself. Anthony M. Ludovici’s 1932 book The Secret of Laughter presents an entirely convincing theory of humor inspired by Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin.  (more…)