•) Pretty sure I'm not the one who brought up Rousseau.
•) Pretty sure it's not irrelevant that, of the two people singing the praises of Hobbes this morning, one employs it as a muddled case suggesting that a recognition of violence in the world somehow makes one not a pacifist, but is shocked, shocked that the true subjects of world violence might not be pacifists...and the other is David Brooks.
•) Re this: "Most such people...," well, it just stays funny. For in this usage it can mean nothing but that one is "smart" and "decent" if one believes as I believe. And yet, somehow, this doesn't come with a recognition that one is simply ventriloquizing class interests. I'll let Barthes handle it: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.
•) And re this, "Like Hobbes, I believe that we all get what we want (except adolescent boys?) not under the conditions of war but of peace," well, I want a house with a backyard for my son to play in, maybe in Westchester. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a war to get that land. What's that you say? It's already been fought on my behalf, years ago? And we won? Huzzah! I'm so totally a pacifist now!
•) Or tell it to Frederick Douglass: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning."
•) But I'll return to a previous request, and with that, remain silent on this debate until it's answered: "please include in your conversation a proposal for how the actual humans living as perpetual subjects of state violence ought behave, in your measure."