00:00:39.000They say, Charlie, what can I do to help save the country?
00:00:42.000Or Charlie, how do I properly educate my kid, my grandkid?
00:00:47.000Well, something that we have been talking about here on the Charlie Kirk Show for quite some time is this challenge of you becoming a teacher for one hour a week.
00:00:59.000We are calling this the hour of liberty.
00:01:02.000Now, maybe you might not be able to homeschool your kids, but I guarantee you, if you are a mom or a dad or a grandfather or a grandmother, you could take one hour a week.
00:01:11.000That's it, one hour a week and sit down with your kids and teach them something with all the phones off.
00:01:17.000They might say, Charlie, I don't know what to teach them.
00:01:19.000Well, I'm looking right now at the Hillsdale College online portfolio.
00:01:27.000This one talks about the stakes of World War II, the air, the water, the earth, the fire, the people, and the ends all of World War II.
00:01:34.000They are compelling, they are interesting, and will give you the information that you need to be able to teach your kids or your grandkids.
00:01:41.000How about this one right here at charlieforhillsdale.com?
00:01:46.000It's Constitution 201, the progressive rejection of the founding and the rise of bureaucratic despotism at charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:01:55.000So if you guys want to be able to equip yourself and your children and grandchildren, I challenge you to do the Liberty Hour every single week.
00:02:37.000We go through Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau.
00:02:40.000We dive deep into the ideas and how it applies today.
00:02:43.000And if you just learn one thing when you listen to this Saturday episode of the Charlie Kirk Show brought to you by Hillsdale College, that'll bless me significantly.
00:03:27.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:03:33.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:04:19.000Okay, so Dr. Habib, I want to start with some of the basics.
00:04:22.000We talk about social contract here on this program quite often, and we do it in a very, I'd say, elementary way and just kind of talk about Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and how these three different thinkers within somewhat of the same period of time all wrestled with this idea of social contract theory.
00:04:45.000Tell us what each of them believed, what they had in common, and the implications of that in political philosophy in the modern era.
00:04:54.000Well, I'll just take them chronologically.
00:04:56.000I think that's the easiest way to do it, because in many ways, they're responding to each other.
00:05:00.000And I would say the real groundbreaker is Thomas Hobbes.
00:05:04.000He writes first, and he's alive during the English Civil War.
00:05:08.000And that was the inspiration for him to essentially rush a series of works out into the public, beginning with his work on the citizen and then Leviathan.
00:05:17.000And what he essentially argues is the only way to bring about equilibrium in politics, to get rid of dysfunctional politics and violence, is to establish what he calls a social contract.
00:05:30.000Now, that social contract is grounded in what he calls natural rights, an inference that he says we draw from our passions, primarily the fear of violent death.
00:05:39.000And if we can at least all agree that when push comes to shove, and if pressed, the most vital thing that we would want in that moment is security, then we can at least agree on a fundamental principle of government, what it ought to aim at, and that is self-preservation.
00:05:54.000Now, according to Hobbes, the most efficient means of doing that would be a monarchy.
00:06:00.000And he saw the dissolution of monarchy during the English Civil War, and he wrote a dialogue titled Behemoth.
00:06:07.000And Behemoth is a character like Leviathan taken from the book of Job.
00:06:12.000And essentially, he wanted these two works to fit together.
00:06:18.000Behemoth shows what the political problem that Leviathan is designed to resolve, and that is the breakdown of civil society, religious persecution, republican ideas, which Hobbes had some reservations about.
00:06:31.000He didn't like the idea that you would have these competing debates about principles of government.
00:06:38.000So his teaching and his studying of the ancients taught him, like some of the Federalists, that you look at ancient republics and it looks like they're just constantly in a state of anarchy.
00:06:48.000So Leviathan restores peace essentially through an absolute monarchy.
00:06:53.000Then comes Hobbes, and they're often seen as very similar, and they are to some extent.
00:07:00.000But the first thing to note about Hobbes, Locke, is Locke is not a monarchist.
00:07:04.000In fact, in the second treatise on government, he said he would rather live in a state of nature than to submit to a monarchy of any kind, period, end of story.
00:07:16.000In Locke's theory of the social contract, we have rights predating the origin of civil society by which we can judge the legitimacy of government.
00:07:26.000And those rights essentially are we are all fundamentally free and equal.
00:07:32.000By equal, he doesn't mean we are egalitarianly equal.
00:07:35.000We're equal with respect to the fact that nobody has a legitimate authority to coerce us.
00:07:41.000And consequently, consent is the basis upon which you build government.
00:07:45.000Now, in his state of nature, unlike Hobbes, in Hobbes' state of nature, it's a war of all against all.
00:07:52.000In Locke, there is a natural law that undergirds civil society from which you can then affect essentially a right to revolution.
00:08:02.000So if the government you put forward ceases to honor and respect your rights and to protect them, then Locke would say you have a natural right, a basis in nature pre-existing the emergence of civil society from which you can launch an attack on the despotic government.
00:08:20.000Now, the other thing that Locke does that's different is his social contract places a far greater emphasis on separation of powers.
00:08:28.000It's not the separation of powers that the founders adopt.
00:08:31.000They adopt Monescue's qualified version of it.
00:08:34.000But the essential principles are there.
00:08:36.000The reason we have the separation of powers, according to Locke, is because it's the most efficient way to protect us ultimately from a government strong enough to protect those rights.
00:08:47.000So you want to decentralize its authority.
00:08:50.000Now, Rousseau is a critic of both Hobbes and Locke.
00:08:53.000And he's a bit complicated because he's a bit all over the place philosophically speaking.
00:09:38.000And in the second discourse, which of course helped to inspire people like Karl Marx, among others, Rousseau claims that the quote, right to property is nothing but a legal agreement.
00:09:51.000By nature, nobody has a right to property.
00:09:54.000This is what launches decades later, the progressive term, an attempt to move away from the American founding, because in many ways, Rousseau and then Hegel following him adopt this view that nature can no longer be the static terra firma.
00:10:12.000The major difference, though, between somebody like Rousseau and Hegel is Rousseau doesn't assume that the future is progressive.
00:10:19.000He thinks the future could turn out, in fact, terrible.
00:10:22.000But once you insinuate that nature is flimsy, it's flexible, it's subject to change over time, you essentially erode the fundamental basis upon which Hobbes and Locke and the American founders essentially put together the Declaration and the Constitution.
00:10:39.000So you're right to pinpoint those three characters as vital to our discussion.
00:10:44.000So let's talk about what those three viewed as far as human nature.
00:10:50.000Did they believe human beings were naturally good or naturally inclined to be, as Thomas Hobbes would say, nasty and brutish and short to one another?
00:11:02.000Jean-Jacques Rousseau, obviously, was more, if I'm remembering my Rousseau correctly, he would value the infant over the adult or the primitive over the civilized and was a chief critic of commercial society.
00:11:18.000What did those three, what did they believe as far as human nature?
00:11:22.000Do they believe people were naturally good or naturally inclined towards sin?
00:11:30.000I'll start with Rousseau to Locke and to Hobbes.
00:11:32.000Rousseau argues in a very controversial way, especially in his book Emile, that human beings are not born in any form of original sin whatsoever.
00:11:43.000And by that, he means we're not governed by vanity, which we pick up in society.
00:11:48.000Society, once we enter civil society, we begin to compare.
00:11:52.000Our vanity starts to come to the surface, and then all sorts of nastiness begins to emerge.
00:11:58.000But Rousseau wants to draw a clear distinction, though, between how nature made us and how civil society made us.
00:12:04.000And he faults Locke, actually, for causing this split.
00:12:08.000He thinks that once you introduce private property and once you introduce these artificial distinctions in civil society, human beings will start to measure themselves in relation to material possessions, and then they will activate sort of this ego-driven competition.
00:12:24.000For Rousseau, it doesn't need to be this way.
00:12:26.000So, his thought experiment in his book, Emile, to raise a boy independent of civil society, he knows it's a fantasy, is designed to show that one, man was not born in original sin, and so therefore the incarnation is superfluous for somebody like Rousseau.
00:12:41.000So, before we get to Locke, I just want to emphasize this for our listeners: that college students, not at Hillsdale, they really like Rousseau.
00:12:50.000He is something that speaks to kind of this uninhibited, unregulated, unchecked spirit of, I don't want to say hedonism, but it could get close to that.
00:13:13.000Yeah, it's extremely idealistic, and it's also very dangerous.
00:13:15.000If you read Lexus de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke on the French Revolution, they both basically point a finger at Rousseau as a major influential culprit in essentially exacerbating the anarchistic impulses that were trying to tear down French society.
00:13:30.000Appealing to these sort of wild abstractions, the appeal to Rousseau, quite often, though, has to do with his perceived environmentalism and animal rights.
00:13:41.000And so, Rousseau essentially creates romanticism.
00:13:45.000He has a work called The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, in which a man goes into these reveries and nature, and he's one with it.
00:13:52.000And his desire there in that work is to essentially drive a wedge between us and us understood as natural beings and commercial manufacturing, because he thinks that that disrupts nature.
00:14:04.000It creates this artificial world in which we're again judging each other not according to merit, but through commerce.
00:14:12.000And so, there's a big appeal in Rousseau toward environmentalism.
00:14:17.000He also is the first to ennoble what he calls the ensea vage, the natural savage, not in a disparaging way, but he actually says a natural savage is far superior to civilized man.
00:14:29.000And you can see in many ways he influenced anthropology.
00:14:33.000I'm not sure that Rousseau ultimately, though, is a hedonist because in Emile and in Julie, he does elevate love.
00:14:41.000Now, you can question whether or not it's consistent with his fundamental thought, but he's actually quite austere in his politics.
00:14:47.000In the social contract, there's hardly any kind of hedonism.
00:14:50.000In his letter to De Lambert, De Lambert was an Enlightenment philosopher, and he wanted to argue that Geneva needs a theater, i.e., it needs a Hollywood.
00:14:58.000And Rousseau actually adopts the tone of a Roman censor and condemns public performance and theater as corrupting on morals.
00:15:08.000That's the side of Rousseau people don't generally read.
00:15:11.000From our perspective, it comes off as extremely conservative.
00:15:14.000And he certainly wants an austere republic, at least as he presents it in his second discourse, in which Geneva is the model of a homogenous people who have direct participation in governing their lives and are austere and are quite Protestant, and they take their familial duties very seriously.
00:15:34.000It's the fragmented aspect of Rousseau, where on the one hand, he's talking about republicanism, and in the next hand, he's celebrating a natural savage where it gets kind of confusing.
00:15:43.000So I want to get to Locke and I have a question about Tabala Rosa.
00:16:13.000Contributing towards this idea of adultery, that one of his most famous books, you might have already mentioned it, was not romanticizing or glorifying, but almost saying that, hey, you should being this kind of loyal spouse might not be the best thing for you.
00:16:32.000I remember Dr. Arne mentioning that in some speech at some point about how Rousseau said that maybe you should just kind of be more in a loose type relationship.
00:16:43.000I don't recall that in any of his particular major works.
00:16:50.000But certainly in his works, the ones that people generally read, like Julie or Letter to De Lambert or Emile, he has a certain ideal that he's driving towards.
00:16:58.000So in Emile, he wants an independent citizen who is whole onto himself and is not a bourgeois.
00:17:04.000In Julie, he wants romantic love to be celebrated.
00:17:07.000In the letter to De Lambert, he wants the theater to be completely stamped out of civil society.
00:17:13.000So in his major works, he comes off as rather morally strict, where the moral corruption of Rousseau really comes through is when you study what he means by a human animal.
00:17:24.000He does think that we simply evolved and in some cases devolved from orangutans.
00:17:31.000This is his famous note P in the second discourse.
00:17:34.000That's where some people can draw sort of implications and consequences of that, saying that there really is no moral compass inherent in nature.
00:17:43.000That all is derived from our social context.
00:17:46.000And when you add this idea of a tabula rasa, meaning that there's nothing inherently ingrained in the human mind, such as the conscience and what have you, then it looks like human morality is extremely fluid and plastic.
00:17:59.000And I think that's where people often can see where Rousseau's sort of this very, this two different worlds, his philosophy of or his anthropology and then his political writings on how these two things come together, because they seem to pull each other in different directions.
00:18:30.000I mean, in the second treatise, he argued that, again, in the state of nature, prior to any kind of civil society, there is a law of nature.
00:18:38.000And that law of nature, he says, is the law of reason.
00:18:40.000He says anyone willing to consult it would essentially learn that you simply don't harm others and take their property and that it's reciprocal.
00:18:48.000For Locke, our rights are always inherently duty bound.
00:18:52.000So if you have a right to property, I have a duty to respect it.
00:18:55.000Now, on the surface, it looks like Locke thinks that human beings are generally good by nature.
00:19:00.000But before he even gets to chapter three, where he talks about the state of the state of war, he does point out in a state of nature that the problem is not many people can reason well.
00:19:12.000And sometimes that the passions can get the better of us.
00:19:16.000And as a result, you can end up harming yourself and others.
00:19:19.000But for Locke, the reason why I'm a little reluctant to say, you know, men are bad by nature for him is that because we have something in nature, nature is still a good standard for Locke.
00:19:30.000And human beings can, through their own reason, actually intellect what it means to be a good human being.
00:19:37.000And he quotes Richard Hooker, among others.
00:19:39.000It's a natural inclination to concern ourselves with ourselves, but also with our fellows.
00:19:46.000I would say Locke is of the trust that verify school.
00:19:49.000That's why when he does finally put together his political commonwealth, so to speak, there is an emphasis also on the separation of powers.
00:19:56.000You don't want people to abuse whatever power they have in government.
00:20:20.000If he advocated a completely void world in the natural world, he couldn't have a teaching about natural right.
00:20:26.000In Hobbes, the picture looks far darker.
00:20:29.000And I think his emphasis is really to stress how useful thinking and reflecting about our fear of violent death can be in helping us determine what the proper end of government ought to be, and that should be security.
00:20:42.000And with Hobbes, you would be hard pressed to say that man by nature is naturally good.
00:20:50.000I think what happens is man is a natural condition of scarcity.
00:20:55.000And in competing for scarce resources in the absence of government and intoxicated with ideas of glory and vainglory and heroism, we're going to come into conflict and it's a hopeless condition until we can use our reason to escape such a world and establish a civil society.
00:21:12.000So I would say he would be of the three, probably the starkest with respect to your question.
00:21:18.000And the reason I ask is I think that's when I go to college campuses, not Hillsdale, I say, do you think human, what is human nature?
00:21:25.000Naturally, you know, are we more inclined to have original sin or do you think we're corrupted by the circumstances around you?
00:21:32.000At the top level schools, Ivy League schools, they almost all say, oh, no, we're basically naturally good.
00:21:36.000We're dealing with a raw material that is, you know, not yet totally defined, but would probably be in the direction of what would be considered good.
00:21:45.000But it's all the systems around us that corrupt us.
00:21:47.000And the significance for my line of work of that question is then they have to explain away all the suffering and the poverty and the tragedy.
00:21:55.000And they do so by saying, well, it's all society's fault.
00:21:58.000It's capitalism or it's racism or it's white supremacy, where you get some of the activist movements and the mobilization of grievances that we see in today's time.
00:22:12.000If you look, actually, I wish I knew we were going in this direction.
00:22:15.000I would have brought my copy of the second discourse, but I'll tell you and your listeners and viewers, take a look at the frontispiece at the beginning of the second discourse.
00:22:23.000He wants to essentially shift the blame of all of our vices and all of our neuroses on civil society.
00:22:32.000And for him, Locke symbolizes capitalism.
00:22:35.000If human beings by nature are good, then it's the institution, it's the structured institution, structural, and then pick your favorite topic that is the source of this corruption.
00:22:46.000This is why it leads to revolutionary ire.
00:22:49.000If you fundamentally accept that belief and you want to restore human beings to a quote natural goodness, you have one of two options, Rousseau says: go in the woods, you can be a solitary walker, or you just simply rejig society and cause a revolution.
00:23:04.000And that's why his thought is still with us today.
00:23:05.000He's extremely important and very influential.
00:24:50.000You would be hard pressed not to see people like, for example, Frederick Nietzsche, who were very influential in the Nazis, and he cites Rousseau.
00:24:57.000So what's amazing about Rousseau, and Leo Strauss once described him as the equivalent of a volcanic eruption.
00:25:03.000And what he meant by that is if you consider lava to be fragments of his influence, it went everywhere.
00:25:09.000Depending on which fragment you caught, you ran away with some aspect of Rousseau.
00:25:15.000Now, why do I say that modern nationalism was influenced by Rousseau?
00:25:20.000Because the national socialists were in reaction to capitalism and communism.
00:25:26.000And Rousseau helps to lay the foundation for that.
00:25:28.000Now, it gets filtered through other thinkers and, of course, through their own ideology.
00:25:34.000But oddly enough, everybody took what they wanted out of Rousseau.
00:25:37.000Marx takes materialism out of Rousseau in a critique of John Locke and then turns it in the direction of communism.
00:25:45.000And then Hegel, of course, takes some of the early seeds of historicism in Rousseau's writing and develops it into a progressive view of history in which history and its future are always likely to be far brighter than the past.
00:25:59.000What they all have in common is a revolutionary spirit because there's a promise that in the future, things will get better.
00:26:07.000They disagree on what that good is, but you're not going to find that optimism in Plato.
00:26:12.000In the Republic, there's a declension of regimes.
00:26:15.000In other words, Plato starts with a perfect regime and then shows you a thousand ways it can go wrong.
00:26:20.000By the end of the Republic, you're purified of political idealism.
00:26:24.000In Aristotle, Aristotle has the ideal regime and then the practical regime.
00:26:29.000By the time you finish with the book, you realize that politics and idealism should never mix.
00:26:35.000It's when you get to Rousseau and his influence that political idealism begins to come back in a big way, plus a serious critique of the early moderns before him, like Hobbes and Locke.
00:26:48.000That makes a very dangerous combination for our times.
00:26:51.000And so I just want everyone to understand this, that what you see on television, what your kids are experiencing at school, the radical deconstruction of society around you can be traced back to a thinker that most Americans don't even know about.
00:27:05.000And his biography is really interesting.
00:27:07.000Can you just take like a minute and just, he lived a really weird life.
00:27:12.000I just think it's interesting for people to know.
00:27:37.000It's not exactly clear over what Hume thought he was a bit temperamental.
00:27:42.000But that's not to downplay, though, his intellectual abilities, because people like Kant and Hume and others really did see there a spark of genius.
00:27:51.000I would consider him a distorted genius, but he's quite a reasoner.
00:27:58.000There are some valid criticisms that he puts forward, but in the end, I think his philosophy is just fundamentally incoherent.
00:28:05.000So Locke was a major inspiration for the founding fathers.
00:28:10.000In fact, Thomas Jefferson wanted to have life, liberty, and property, which I think would have been a copy-paste right out of Locke.
00:28:18.000Talk about how Locke really inspired the philosophical foundation for many of our founding fathers of this great country.
00:28:27.000So the primary contribution of Locke, and it is immense, somebody at one point had done a study of virtually all of the founding documents that we have at our disposal and wanted to make a list of who was quoted most often as an authority.
00:28:39.000I believe the Bible was number one, and Locke was like number two or three.
00:28:44.000So it's pretty evident that Locke's influence is all over the founding.
00:28:48.000The founders adopted his understanding of natural right, which for Locke, again, means that we are born free and equal by nature and nature is God.
00:28:57.000And that the purpose, and here's the real emphasis: the purpose of government is not to give us these rights.
00:29:05.000Once you understand that nature has provided us rights, then the purpose of government is to protect those.
00:29:13.000And so the primacy of the individual in the community of which we're a part plays a massive role in Locke.
00:29:19.000And then it helps define what the proper end of government ought to be, and that is to protect those rights.
00:29:25.000The other thing they took from him is also the separation of powers.
00:29:28.000Again, it's not the identical one that he puts forward, but that government should have separate branches checking each other so as to ensure that there's never abuse from this government that is established essentially to protect our rights.
00:29:41.000And so I would say Locke's natural right teaching is essential and it's really the core in many ways.
00:29:47.000It was as my friend and colleague in our department, Tom West, recently wrote a book on a political theory of the American founding.
00:29:53.000And he said, look, they disagreed on many things, but there was an obvious consensus among them.
00:29:58.000And that was the popularity of John Locke's teaching and these doctrines of natural right and that there's a natural law and that the purpose of government is to circumscribe certain limits with respect to government and to protect those rights.
00:30:13.000Every one of these thinkers was right about something.
00:30:16.000I think more were right about more than others, obviously.
00:30:19.000But let's talk just for a second about Thomas Hobbes, and then I want to get your opinion on Machiavelli in the couple minutes we have remaining.
00:30:26.000And we have to have you back on because this is.
00:30:28.000I was going to say, man, you're going to have me back for Machiavelli.
00:30:37.000So I want to ask about Hobbes, though, in this world of safetyism that we live in, where it seems that everyone is walking around fearing violent death all the time, wearing two masks, just mandating vaccines, whatever it might be.
00:30:54.000And I'm not asking you to overly apply that, but talk about how Hobbes might have been onto something where, hey, almost everyone over their head, you know, you're going to die.
00:31:05.000It's kind of this ever-present sort of Damocles.
00:31:29.000So you've just made my point, Hobbes would say.
00:31:31.000Now, Locke would say, though, rights are even more fundamental.
00:31:35.000I would say that the sensitivity to any perceived threat isn't so much comes from Hobbes, because there's still a very strong political sense in Hobbes.
00:31:49.000He describes conditions among nations as a state of war.
00:31:52.000He doesn't assume that you'll ever have this kind of global peace.
00:31:56.000So there is a hard teaching at Hobbes.
00:31:58.000I would say what you're really... seeing is the effects of Montesquieu.
00:32:01.000Montesquieu is the thinker who argued that human nature is fundamentally timid.
00:32:07.000Hobbes did not think human nature was fundamentally timid.
00:32:10.000He thought that the problem with human nature is that it's not timid.
00:32:13.000So I would say that what you're seeing with the relinquishing of any kind of freedom and rights in the name of triple masking and living in a bubble is more of the Montesquieuian element that the worst thing to fear is anything that would disrupt tranquility.
00:32:28.000So I would say there's still a harder edge in Hobbes and Locke that's virtually absent in Montesquieu.
00:32:33.000His state of nature, for example, Hobbes, we're fighting and killing and slaughtering each other.
00:32:38.000In Montesquieu, he presents a picture equivalent of something like Disney's Bambi.
00:33:34.000Okay, Machiavelli, your eyes lit up, which I'm not really sure how to take that because sometimes when people love Machiavelli, I say that person shouldn't be given power.
00:33:43.000Machiavelli wrote, I think, right near 1519 or something, 1520-ish, right?
00:33:48.000And some people would say that he kind of started the Enlightenment.
00:33:51.000I don't know if you agree with that or not.
00:33:53.000I heard, I think it was Michael Anton say that recently.
00:33:57.000Tell us about a little bit biographical and then just in the couple minutes you have remaining, why we should care about Machiavelli that we can get in all the good and the bad of it.
00:34:06.000Okay, well, Machiavelli was also immensely influential, not just simply on the founding, but just in shaping the contours of the Enlightenment.
00:34:13.000When I say I love him, I love him the way I love all great thinkers.
00:34:16.000There's so much to really think about.
00:34:18.000I'm also working on a book in which he plays a big role.
00:34:23.000Machiavelli was an actually practicing political statesman.
00:34:27.000And it was only when he was in exile that he turned to writing The Prince and The Art of War and the Discourses.
00:34:34.000He essentially wrote for a number of reasons.
00:34:37.000One, to correct what he saw was defective in the Renaissance, and that was just the aesthetics of trying to restore ancient art and beauty.
00:34:44.000He thought that what they're missing was actually ancient virtue, that they were missing out on the core of politics, which for him was deeply militaristic, deeply expansionistic, and deeply republican.
00:34:56.000And so all, and during the Renaissance, there was an attempt to synthesize Christianity with classical virtue, and Machiavelli calls them out on that.
00:35:04.000They're just two incompatible worldviews.
00:35:06.000You're going to have to pick one, but you can't try to synthesize both.
00:35:10.000And so what he ends up doing and why people like Michael Anton, another friend and colleague of ours, would say, and I think with great justification, that in many ways Machiavelli kicks off the Enlightenment, it's because it's the first thoroughgoing attempt to critique the ancients and also the moderns in his own time, But also make a fundamental shift in philosophy that had never quite been done before.
00:35:33.000And that is to make philosophy practical, make it ideological.
00:35:37.000In Plato and Aristotle, there's too much prudence baked into their theory.
00:35:42.000Whereas with Machiavelli, his emphasis on founding is designed to give us a sense of the character of philosophy.
00:35:48.000It's not necessarily theoretical and good in itself, or any of these abstractions that you often hear among the ancients.
00:35:55.000For Machiavelli, the purpose of politics is to satisfy man's natural desire for acquisition and conquest.
00:36:02.000And that shapes the rest of Western civilization once he enters that.
00:36:06.000Then you can start seeing the thinkers we just discussed in many ways reacting to him.
00:36:23.000And if you think about the ancients, I mean, their entire world was based on a certain kind of looking at political idealism or looking at the perfect regime.
00:36:34.000He wants to take us away from the perfect regime to the imperfect and how it can perhaps be improved upon.
00:36:39.000And so he turns to ancient Rome to show us a case study of how a people struggled to finally get the liberty that they always longed for, but it was in facing human condition, not with the blinders of Romanticism or ancient thought.
00:37:11.000The church was the only organized and powerful entity, but it was dividing Christendom on itself, and popes were beginning to ascend to a level that had never been reached before, and they were essentially undermining national sovereignty.
00:37:24.000You can see this in Shakespeare's play, King John.
00:37:26.000In King John, you have an English king and a French king going at it on a foreign policy issue, and it's Rome that determines whether or not they should sign the treaty or not.
00:37:35.000Well, that's the world in which Machiavelli is born and operating in.
00:37:38.000And he thinks that until the question of the church is settled, before you can move forward and commence with the unification of Italy, you have to reconceive the role of religion in modernity.
00:37:50.000And so what he does is he forces religion to become far more civil, but essentially an extension of the state as opposed to an instrument of the church.
00:39:03.000And according to Montesquieu, he is the thinker of their time and ours in many ways.
00:39:07.000Well, next time come with a couple references on the Prince and all of that, because I think it could be very helpful for what we're experiencing right now in our country and power dynamics.
00:39:22.000And the phrase the end justifies the means is a very short but accurate way to describe some of what he talks about, but it's so much deeper than that and so much more profound.
00:39:31.000Doctor, I've enjoyed this conversation.
00:39:53.000I just, I'll skip over the undergrad and then we'll go over there.
00:39:57.000So, but I, I, all kidding aside, Charlie for Hillsdale.com.
00:40:02.000I took the Aristotle course, the Introduction to Western Philosophy, Constitution 101, the Winston Churchill course, working through C.S. Lewis, and also the Constitution 201.
00:40:13.000It's deep stuff, but it's digestible and it's just terrific.