…You know what I'm talking about. You see a big truck. In the little back window, you see a little Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. And he'll be peeing on something. Something the truck owner takes a dim view of. So if it's a Ford truck owner, they might…

…we want power. We want more and more of all of those things because life sucks. That's basically the model. It recurs. Augustine Hobbes has got the same thing. Curiously enough, to first get capital free market ideas across, they had to put that on hold…

…a world of finite resources and thus are naturally competitive. This theory was eventually given a secular backing with Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, who set out the long-accepted savage beast conception of humankind. The natural condition of mankind is…

…primitive, or whatever they want to call them nowadays, stateless societies, but hunter-gatherers especially, you really haven't gotten over the Hobbes versus Rousseau split. Either they're an idyllic example of what we should all go back to, or they're Steve…

…of political economy, eighteenth-century, early nineteenth-century political economy. This is mainly English, not solely English, but it's from Locke and Hobbes and Hume to of course Adam Smith and Ricardo and Malthus and a host of other figures like Stuart…

…will constantly try to maximize amongst scarce resources. Straight back to St. Augustine as punishment for original sin through Hobbes. People have traced out these ideas and where they come from. And they're actually originally theological ideas. There's…

…efficiencies and markets. Justin Driver, That that's really not doing full justice that it's really it's a Leviathan state under Hobbes Ian kind of modeling that gets created in the 1600s. Justin Driver, With lock you know, providing the intellectual…

…them, without social rules like the forbidding of usury that was in medieval times. So the war of everybody to everybody that Hobbes describes is exactly the logical result of this kind of society. And this stressing out the idea of the few reminds me…

…makes a point that personally I would agree with, which is that we don't have to have this endless debate between Hobbes and Rousseau. Were we originally hierarchical? Were we originally egalitarian? It's a false dichotomy, he says. What makes us human is…

…egalitarian or were they complex and stratified? Well, maybe it's the question that's just wrong. Do we have to choose between Hobbes and Rousseau? Do we have to choose between an egalitarian and a hierarchical beginning to the human story? We don't think…

…on that topic, it seems to be the case. People have been telling this story for probably at least since the time of Hobbes and Rousseau. It's really an Enlightenment story. It goes back to the 18th century. which just resurfaces in one form or another…

…actually Boehm who puts it very nicely when he says we seem to be trapped in this endless kind of to and fro between Hobbes on the one hand and Rousseau on the other. So on the one hand, there are the sort of neo-Rousseau type commentators, who…