Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 11:54:57 -0400
Subject: Re: More on Modernism, Reason and Myth


Come on, Rahul. You did _not_ make any other arguments; I went back and
checked just to be sure. You wrote a one-liner about the Ugartic Baal epics
being the name for a rock group, and made this point about Hobbes and divine
right. The rest of your post was directed toward what Justin had said, and
whether or not he was a pragmatist, and why you didn't like Rousseau. Now if
you want to make a new set of arguments, fine, but please don't pretend you
made them before and I ignored them. With all due respect, that is the
sophism.

I'm going to show the same insistence on correctly citing political
philosophy that you want for physics. All you have to do is go to John Locke
to see how the concept of the social contract, and the idea that the
legitimacy of the state rests upon the will of the people, leads right to the
idea of a right to revolution. (We can throw in Thomas Jefferson and the
Declaration of Independence, clearly inspired by Locke on this count, for
good measure.) Hardly politically quietist!  Hobbes was clearly more of an
absolutist who did not recognize a right to revolution (but did see a duty to
obedience to a revolutionary government once it was established); we can
discuss why this was the case and compare him to Locke, but this would take
us into some complex terrain which relates to the very difficult question of
how one grounds limits on a government based on legal-rational legitimation.

Analogy is a form of logic, and has been since Aristotle wrote about logic.
If I am correct that you are referring back to my response to Justin here,
let me say that induction too is a form of logic. One of the first subjects
in a logic course is the different forms of logic; the notion that logic can
be reduced to the one form of deductive syllogism is, my friend, quite
fallacious. We use inductive reasoning (generalizing) all the time; when one
does a representative survey of a universe, we assume by inductive reasoning
that the results are reflective of the entire universe. The logic behind
demanding that scientific experiments be duplicated involves, among other
things, inductive reasoning. There are ways to refute analogies and inductive
reasoning; pointing out that they are not deductive reasoning is hardly one!
It is just an avoidance of the argument which has been made. (This
fetishization of deductive syllogisms rests, I  believe, on the false premise
that they can entirely separated from rhetoric, while analogy {sounds
dangerously like metaphor} is more suspect.)

The relevance of Hobbes is thus: if he was one of the first to expound a
particular style of argument with a particular conception of logic, and if
this modern conception of logic became the basis for the idea of Reason in
western thought (most especially the Enlightenment), and if he continues to
be the model for a great deal of the work in the field (rational choice
theorists love him, and are one of the most prominent schools of
interpretation of him), then there is insight to be gained from a close study
of his texts. I don't think this is such a hard thing to see: it would be no
different than the reasons why a historian/philosopher of science would go
back to study the work of Newton or Einstein. 

Leo

PS: In political science, where rational choice Marxists are a very small
subset of rational choice theorists in general, the colloquial term of
reference is rat's choice.

In a message dated 96-04-08 00:35:47 EDT, Rahul writes:

>Sorry, I didn't mean to say that Hobbes defended the divine right of kings,
>but rather that he was concerned to defend absolute monarchy. Don't know
>what I was thinking. I can't see the initial introduction of the idea of
>the social contract as anything other than an attempt to instill political
>quietism by the force of reason, since the force of religion seemed to be
>insufficient.
>
>Why are you once again following the sophistic technique of picking on the
>least significant of the criticisms I made? What about the weakness of your
>method and mode of argumentation (strictly analogic, not logical), and what
>about the relevance? Why does what Hobbes thought or didn't think have
>anything to do with how we should view the role of myth 300 years later?
>
>Rahul




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