Leviathan finished

Well, not technically. Didn't read the fourth book, 'On The Kingdome of Darknesse'. I was listening to a few reviews of Hobbes, one of them a Yale philosophy course I got a from iTunes U, and everyone is in agreement it seems that the last two books are of little modern importance. I enjoyed the third book and am glad I read it, but truthfully the gems of knowledge were much more spread out and of arguably less importance than those in the first two books. I also read much of the English Civil War, the circumstances that if not prompted Hobbes to write the Leviathan, at least shaped his viewpoints.

I heard a lot of criticism leveled at Hobbes' reductionist approach to human nature, or at least his hypothetical example of humans living freely in nature. I agree that this example is purely hypothetical and probably never existed as purely as Hobbes wrote. But there is value in reasoning in such a manner. I do believe that much of the social sciences can be approached in a reductionist approach, beginning with physics, to chemistry, to biology, to psychology, to sociology, and from there to economics and politics and such. I do not believe philosophy and theology can be examined in such a manner - philosophy is purely subjective and value-based, and theology, as I believe it at least, is rooted in something higher than humanity and thus cannot be reasoned out. But if this reductionist approach can be used, then examining the natural (not practicable) state of humanity is of course useful.

Absolutism certainly appeals to me as a political approach. If the state can accommodate a meritocracy, or at least a semblance of it, then it is superior to many alternatives. Truly, some people may wish not to live under a tyrant, and instead to return to a "solitary, nasty, brutish, poor, and short" life, preferring it to life as a slave. I can imagine this would certainly be true of marginalized and persecuted peoples. But if a monarch be just, or at least fair, then I cannot imagine any person would want to leave the sovereignty.

On to Nietzsche.