Looking for Leviathan

Who's afraid of the big bad _Leviathan_? I have been hearing horror stories about reading this monster of a text, so to gear up for this week, I read many different commentaries and summaries to help me understand the chaos that is Hobbes. My fellow students warned me it would be difficult to understand. My prof decided not to give us a writing assignment on it because she feared we might self-combust or riot against her. So apprehensively I cracked my book open to the introduction of this behemoth of literature and...

Lo and behold, I loved it! _Leviathan_ is not unlike the monster in your closet, ever present and lurking in the darkness, terrifying your six year old self until you confront it by opening the door and peeking inside with your flashlight. Needless to say, we didn't have to read the entire thing. We only read about 100 pages or so of various chapters. He is rather Darwinian and I liked his sense of pessimism. Unfortunately he made it clear that he was writing only about MEN for MEN, so I felt a little left out because I wasn't invited to play. However, he did manage to throw in an interesting blurb about women every now and then, just to put us in our place. (You know, can't let the women think this political talk could apply to them!) Here is an interesting passage, which I took out of context, since it was used to argue why women should not be the head of the household:

"In Commonwealths this controversy is decided by the civil law: and for the most part, but not always, the sentence is in favour of the father, because for the most part Commonwealths have been erected by the fathers, not by the mothers of families. But the question lieth now in the state of mere nature where there are supposed no laws of matrimony, no laws for the education of children, but the law of nature and the natural inclination of the sexes, one to another, and to their children. In this condition of mere nature, either the parents between themselves dispose of the dominion over the child by contract, or do not dispose thereof at all. If they dispose thereof, the right passeth according to the contract. We find in history that the Amazons contracted with the men of the neighbouring countries, to whom they had recourse for issue, that the issue male should be sent back, but the female remain with themselves: so that the dominion of the females was in the mother."
- Thomas Hobbes, _Leviathan_, 1651

Although we women were not really invited to this commonwealth tea party he hosts, there was a lot said that could be applied to how governments are run today. He complains about the tendency of commitees to squabble and get nothing done, as well as the problems of just letting the aristocracy run the show. However, where we would be crying, "elect a president", Hobbes is shouting, "establish an absolute monarchy!" Ummm...okay Hobbes, whatever...

You can't blame the guy. I mean, he was and Englishman stuck in Paris writing _Leviathan_ as his country duked it out in a civil war. After several years, I think any of us might have chosen an absolute monarchy just to stop the bloody thing. After all, as Hobbes pointed out, man in nature alone is fine, but put two men together with a stick, and suddenly you get jealousy, greed, violence, and lust after a stupid twig. Why? Because deep down we are all two years old and want what others have regardless of what it is. Luckily for us, instead of bashing each other over the head with clubs and swiping each other's rocks, Hobbes points out that our biggest motivator is a fear of death. That is the only reason we decide to put down our weapons and try to get along as a society. Way to go Hobbes, pointing out how we humans always strive for the greater good!