Across America, whether it be at a grass-roots rally or on a 24-hour news station, the importance of liberty and freedom is constantly stressed regardless of what the topic is. Americans seem to hold those two words closer to their hearts than any other citizenry in the world. I've found that no matter what side you classify yourself on in American politics, the lack of understanding of those two words to be quite unsettling. Reading chapter 13-19 of Hobbes greatly helped me to put that disturbing idea to the forefront of my thinking because I am constantly comparing his ideas and theories to the society I live in as well as the government that represents me.
In the first paragraph of chapter 14, Hobbes defines liberty writing,
"By liberty, is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments: which impediments, may oft take away part of a man's power to do what he would; but cannot hinder him from using the power left him, according as his judgement, and reason shall dictate to him."
Maybe the dilemma is not that people do not understand what Hobbes is writing, but that their ignorance of what is going on blinds them from reality. For example, inadequate public schools plague young students across the country and so many citizens support leaders that run for office on platforms of "freedom" and "liberty" but seemingly do nothing to remove that external impediment. Hobbes is not the end-all-be-all for political theory, however, his ideas go almost hand in hand with what so many believe our society and government should be based on.
This portion of the reading made me very critical of our citizenry and the large amount of hypocrites that constantly stress the importance of liberty but dont believe in the removal of certain external impediments .
I believe that the discussion on the existence of true liberty in its most pure form, unhindered by external impediments in the United States today is important to discuss. While Hobbes does recognize that liberty is one of the most crucial aspects to a free man's livelihood, he also recognizes the outcomes of the final "design of men" (173). In Chapter 17, Hobbes furthers the discussion on the outcome of men who "naturally love liberty, and dominion over others," but who also live by the "foresight of their own preservation," removing themselves from the condition of war, and into a life of covenants, created within the commonwealth (173-175). In this acceptance of the conditions of natural life, Hobbes realizes that to preserve liberty and freedom, men must join under a commonwealth, by which they renounce "pure" liberty, and instead accept the liberty by which they have agreed to. Hobbes also addresses that "to resist the sword of the commonwealth...no man hath liberty; because such liberty, takes away from the sovereign, the means of protecting us; and is therefore destructive of the very essence of government" (192).
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of referring to these positions is to address your final thought in which the "citizenry and large amount of hypocrites" openly regard liberty as important but do not remove external impediments. Using Hobbes' theory, I believe that the citizenry and those politicians you referred to earlier, are merely regarding the liberty of the subjects, whom have freely, and by natural decision, accepted and supported the commonwealth; the government by which we live (Chapter 21, page 188).