<![CDATA[Christianism And Violence, Ctd]]>Zack Beauchamp adds to the conversation about Jesus and the Second Amendment. He makes a key point about Hobbes and Locke (but especially Hobbes): self-defense was indeed the basis of a Hobbesian political order and the defense of private property integral to Locke’s. But the idea – asserted by David Mamet in an embarrassing screed – that Hobbes did not for those reasons establish a Leviathan with a monopoly of force is preposterous. That was the whole point. Hobbes emerged from Mamet’s paradise: a polity with no police force in which self-defense was critical and when political differences emerged, civil warfare was the natural response. Hobbes lived through Mamet’s moronic utopia and found it so terrifying he changed global consciousness to rein it back in.
More on the Mamet piece soon. God it was awful.
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