I build to understand the world and to grow into a better human.
About
I study mechanical engineering at Duke, class of 2029, on the Angier B. Duke scholarship, and I TA the first year engineering design course. This past summer I was a visiting student at New College, Oxford, writing political theory essays in tutorial.
Six weeks there changed how I look at things. I came back appreciating literature more, paying closer attention to the life I am actually living, and became a better student.
Below are a few excerpts from the essays I wrote there.
He splits the relationship between people and government into two vocabularies. Individuals leaving the state of nature act horizontally, as equals, agreeing “with other Men to joyn and unite into a Community”. The government gets a different word. It is not a second party to a compact but a trustee, and “Governments are dissolved... when the Legislative, or the Prince, either of them act contrary to their Trust”. A contract is reciprocal, both sides hold claims, whereas a trust binds only the trustee, and only the trustee can breach it.
Obedience is internal in its labor, each citizen tests his reading against the vote’s outcome, but not internal in its condition, since the recalculation is compelled by the entire body’s enforcement, a collective fact. Obedience, then, is neither passive compliance nor collective deliberation, but the repeated work of testing one’s particular interest against a verdict citizens together enforce, work that never finishes, since the temptation to mistake private interest for common interest never finishes either.
Hobbes names his own creation not as a garden or an island but as “that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, that Mortall God.” This essay argues that Hobbes’ state is utopian in outcome while not in method, in the motivation of the people it governs, or in its limits. Hobbes claims a total and lasting peace on the same scale as Bacon’s own totalizing ambition. Yet, he rejects Bacon’s method of patient accumulation for an immediate deductive science, assumes a people who are flawed rather than completely devoted to societal benefit, and by his own naming of his creation as a Mortall God, concedes that the peace he claims cannot actually cross the line between sovereigns themselves.
Capitalism, like every mode of production before it, had a beginning. Marx frames the historical sequence as a series of “progressive epochs in the economic development of society,” and he does not leave it open at its far end. Bourgeois relations are “the last antagonistic form of the social process of production,” and with their resolution “the pre-history of human society draws to a close.” A system that entered history through one epoch can leave it through another, and the Preface locates where capitalism’s own exit begins.
Hobbes levels an almost identical charge against the political vocabulary and lessons he inherited from antiquity. Aristotle, Cicero, and the other Greek and Roman writers who shaped western political thought, he claims, “derived those Rights, not from the Principles of Nature, but transcribed them into their books, out of the Practise of their own Common-wealths, which were Popular.” Reading these classical authors uncritically gave Englishmen, on Hobbes’s account, “a habit... of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Sovereigns,” so that “there was never any thing so deerly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latine tongues.”
