The Charlie Kirk Show - 3 Great Thinkers Who Inspired and Horrified the Founding Fathers with Dr. Khalil Habib

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we have Dr. Khalil Habib.

00:00:05.000 You guys are going to love this conversation, which is brought to you by Hillsdale College, the beacon of the North.

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00:00:19.000 I just completed my Winston Churchill Statesmanship course, and it was so interesting, taught by Dr. Larry Arne.

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00:00:32.000 He said that, I believe, in the metaphysics, where he said that every human being desires to know more.

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00:02:35.000 What is social contract theory?

00:02:36.000 What does it mean?

00:02:37.000 We go through Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau.

00:02:40.000 We dive deep into the ideas and how it applies today.

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00:03:09.000 Great conversation coming up.

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00:03:12.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:03:42.000 That's why we are here.

00:03:45.000 Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:48.000 With us today is Dr. Habib, whose specialty is political philosophy.

00:03:53.000 So I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

00:03:56.000 And he hails from many different places, but of course, Hillsdale College being the most important.

00:04:02.000 Dr. Habib, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:04:04.000 Charlie, good to be with you.

00:04:05.000 So we have so many different topics I want to get into.

00:04:09.000 I just want to remind everyone that you can dive deep into these ideas at charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:04:15.000 That's Charlie F-O-Rhillsdale.com.

00:04:19.000 Okay, so Dr. Habib, I want to start with some of the basics.

00:04:22.000 We 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.

00:04:45.000 Tell us what each of them believed, what they had in common, and the implications of that in political philosophy in the modern era.

00:04:53.000 Sure.

00:04:54.000 Well, I'll just take them chronologically.

00:04:56.000 I think that's the easiest way to do it, because in many ways, they're responding to each other.

00:05:00.000 And I would say the real groundbreaker is Thomas Hobbes.

00:05:04.000 He writes first, and he's alive during the English Civil War.

00:05:08.000 And 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.

00:05:17.000 And 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.

00:05:30.000 Now, 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.

00:05:39.000 And 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.

00:05:54.000 Now, according to Hobbes, the most efficient means of doing that would be a monarchy.

00:06:00.000 And he saw the dissolution of monarchy during the English Civil War, and he wrote a dialogue titled Behemoth.

00:06:07.000 And Behemoth is a character like Leviathan taken from the book of Job.

00:06:12.000 And essentially, he wanted these two works to fit together.

00:06:15.000 And here's how they fit together.

00:06:18.000 Behemoth 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.

00:06:31.000 He didn't like the idea that you would have these competing debates about principles of government.

00:06:37.000 He thought that they were unstable.

00:06:38.000 So 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.

00:06:48.000 So Leviathan restores peace essentially through an absolute monarchy.

00:06:53.000 Then comes Hobbes, and they're often seen as very similar, and they are to some extent.

00:07:00.000 But the first thing to note about Hobbes, Locke, is Locke is not a monarchist.

00:07:04.000 In 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.

00:07:13.000 Locke is far more Republican.

00:07:16.000 In 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.

00:07:26.000 And those rights essentially are we are all fundamentally free and equal.

00:07:32.000 By equal, he doesn't mean we are egalitarianly equal.

00:07:35.000 We're equal with respect to the fact that nobody has a legitimate authority to coerce us.

00:07:41.000 And consequently, consent is the basis upon which you build government.

00:07:45.000 Now, in his state of nature, unlike Hobbes, in Hobbes' state of nature, it's a war of all against all.

00:07:52.000 In Locke, there is a natural law that undergirds civil society from which you can then affect essentially a right to revolution.

00:08:02.000 So 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.

00:08:20.000 Now, the other thing that Locke does that's different is his social contract places a far greater emphasis on separation of powers.

00:08:28.000 It's not the separation of powers that the founders adopt.

00:08:31.000 They adopt Monescue's qualified version of it.

00:08:34.000 But the essential principles are there.

00:08:36.000 The 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.

00:08:47.000 So you want to decentralize its authority.

00:08:50.000 Now, Rousseau is a critic of both Hobbes and Locke.

00:08:53.000 And he's a bit complicated because he's a bit all over the place philosophically speaking.

00:08:57.000 I'll give you an example.

00:08:59.000 In his second discourse, in Rousseau's second discourse, he argues that you can't derive right from nature.

00:09:06.000 Now, that's problematic.

00:09:08.000 So right away, he's attacking one of the fundamental principles that are both in Hobbes and in Locke.

00:09:14.000 And what does he mean by this?

00:09:15.000 In many ways, he anticipates what we would call the fact-value distinction.

00:09:21.000 For Rousseau, he says nature is simply physical.

00:09:24.000 Right is a moral postulate.

00:09:27.000 And he argues that you can't derive a right from nature.

00:09:30.000 So in including a right to property.

00:09:33.000 Now, the right to property in Locke is sanctor-sanct.

00:09:36.000 In Rousseau, it's problematic.

00:09:38.000 And 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.

00:09:49.000 It's strictly conventional.

00:09:51.000 By nature, nobody has a right to property.

00:09:54.000 This 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.

00:10:10.000 It now changes over time.

00:10:12.000 The major difference, though, between somebody like Rousseau and Hegel is Rousseau doesn't assume that the future is progressive.

00:10:19.000 He thinks the future could turn out, in fact, terrible.

00:10:22.000 But 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.

00:10:39.000 So you're right to pinpoint those three characters as vital to our discussion.

00:10:44.000 So let's talk about what those three viewed as far as human nature.

00:10:50.000 Did 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?

00:11:02.000 Jean-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.

00:11:18.000 What did those three, what did they believe as far as human nature?

00:11:22.000 Do they believe people were naturally good or naturally inclined towards sin?

00:11:26.000 Or not so?

00:11:27.000 So this time I'll go backwards.

00:11:30.000 I'll start with Rousseau to Locke and to Hobbes.

00:11:32.000 Rousseau argues in a very controversial way, especially in his book Emile, that human beings are not born in any form of original sin whatsoever.

00:11:41.000 By nature, we are fully good.

00:11:43.000 And by that, he means we're not governed by vanity, which we pick up in society.

00:11:48.000 Society, once we enter civil society, we begin to compare.

00:11:52.000 Our vanity starts to come to the surface, and then all sorts of nastiness begins to emerge.

00:11:58.000 But Rousseau wants to draw a clear distinction, though, between how nature made us and how civil society made us.

00:12:04.000 And he faults Locke, actually, for causing this split.

00:12:08.000 He 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.

00:12:24.000 For Rousseau, it doesn't need to be this way.

00:12:26.000 So, 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.

00:12:41.000 So, before we get to Locke, I just want to emphasize this for our listeners: that college students, not at Hillsdale, they really like Rousseau.

00:12:50.000 He 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.

00:13:04.000 Can you talk about that?

00:13:05.000 How Rousseau is very attractive to an 18, 19, or 20-year-old.

00:13:11.000 It's very idealistic in some sense.

00:13:13.000 Yeah, it's extremely idealistic, and it's also very dangerous.

00:13:15.000 If 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.

00:13:30.000 Appealing to these sort of wild abstractions, the appeal to Rousseau, quite often, though, has to do with his perceived environmentalism and animal rights.

00:13:41.000 And so, Rousseau essentially creates romanticism.

00:13:45.000 He 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.

00:13:52.000 And 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.

00:14:04.000 It creates this artificial world in which we're again judging each other not according to merit, but through commerce.

00:14:12.000 And so, there's a big appeal in Rousseau toward environmentalism.

00:14:17.000 He 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.

00:14:29.000 And you can see in many ways he influenced anthropology.

00:14:31.000 So, there's quite an appeal there.

00:14:33.000 I'm not sure that Rousseau ultimately, though, is a hedonist because in Emile and in Julie, he does elevate love.

00:14:41.000 Now, you can question whether or not it's consistent with his fundamental thought, but he's actually quite austere in his politics.

00:14:47.000 In the social contract, there's hardly any kind of hedonism.

00:14:50.000 In 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.

00:14:58.000 And Rousseau actually adopts the tone of a Roman censor and condemns public performance and theater as corrupting on morals.

00:15:08.000 That's the side of Rousseau people don't generally read.

00:15:11.000 From our perspective, it comes off as extremely conservative.

00:15:14.000 And 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.

00:15:34.000 It'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.

00:15:43.000 So I want to get to Locke and I have a question about Tabala Rosa.

00:15:48.000 I think I said that right.

00:15:49.000 Tabola Raza? 0.99

00:15:49.000 Raza? 0.99

00:15:50.000 Tabula Rosa.

00:15:51.000 Tabula Rosa.

00:15:52.000 I'm pulling on a line.

00:15:54.000 All my Hillsdale courses I've taken, because yeah, that's right.

00:15:57.000 By the way, I heard you're taking them.

00:15:58.000 Thank you.

00:15:58.000 That's right.

00:15:59.000 I have completed five of them, and they've really enriched my life.

00:16:03.000 I could say that.

00:16:04.000 So I want to ask about Rousseau and his impact on the idea of not impact.

00:16:12.000 What's the best way to say this?

00:16:13.000 Contributing 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.

00:16:31.000 Can you help explore that?

00:16:32.000 I 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.

00:16:43.000 I don't recall that in any of his particular major works.

00:16:46.000 It might be in his confessions.

00:16:48.000 That might be a reference there.

00:16:50.000 But 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.

00:16:58.000 So in Emile, he wants an independent citizen who is whole onto himself and is not a bourgeois.

00:17:04.000 In Julie, he wants romantic love to be celebrated.

00:17:07.000 In the letter to De Lambert, he wants the theater to be completely stamped out of civil society.

00:17:13.000 So 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.

00:17:24.000 He does think that we simply evolved and in some cases devolved from orangutans.

00:17:31.000 This is his famous note P in the second discourse.

00:17:34.000 That's where some people can draw sort of implications and consequences of that, saying that there really is no moral compass inherent in nature.

00:17:43.000 That all is derived from our social context.

00:17:46.000 And 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.

00:17:59.000 And 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.

00:18:16.000 So let's go to John Locke.

00:18:17.000 Did John Locke believe that people were naturally good or naturally predisposed towards something other than that?

00:18:26.000 Or did he believe that people were a blank slate?

00:18:29.000 A little bit of both.

00:18:30.000 I 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.

00:18:38.000 And that law of nature, he says, is the law of reason.

00:18:40.000 He 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.

00:18:48.000 For Locke, our rights are always inherently duty bound.

00:18:52.000 So if you have a right to property, I have a duty to respect it.

00:18:55.000 Now, on the surface, it looks like Locke thinks that human beings are generally good by nature.

00:19:00.000 But 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.

00:19:12.000 And sometimes that the passions can get the better of us.

00:19:16.000 And as a result, you can end up harming yourself and others.

00:19:19.000 But 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.

00:19:30.000 And human beings can, through their own reason, actually intellect what it means to be a good human being.

00:19:37.000 And he quotes Richard Hooker, among others.

00:19:39.000 It's a natural inclination to concern ourselves with ourselves, but also with our fellows.

00:19:44.000 And so, but he's not naive.

00:19:46.000 I would say Locke is of the trust that verify school.

00:19:49.000 That's why when he does finally put together his political commonwealth, so to speak, there is an emphasis also on the separation of powers.

00:19:56.000 You don't want people to abuse whatever power they have in government.

00:20:00.000 So now, with Locke, sorry.

00:20:02.000 No, no, no, please.

00:20:03.000 So, with Hobbes, the picture looks very different.

00:20:07.000 It looks as if man is essentially left on his own devices in the state of nature in Hobbes' depiction.

00:20:12.000 Now, that's not to say that he doesn't believe that there's a fundamental nature that can still guide us.

00:20:16.000 He still believes, for example, in natural right.

00:20:16.000 He does.

00:20:20.000 If he advocated a completely void world in the natural world, he couldn't have a teaching about natural right.

00:20:26.000 In Hobbes, the picture looks far darker.

00:20:29.000 And 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.

00:20:42.000 And with Hobbes, you would be hard pressed to say that man by nature is naturally good.

00:20:50.000 I think what happens is man is a natural condition of scarcity.

00:20:55.000 And 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.

00:21:12.000 So I would say he would be of the three, probably the starkest with respect to your question.

00:21:18.000 And 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?

00:21:25.000 Naturally, you know, are we more inclined to have original sin or do you think we're corrupted by the circumstances around you?

00:21:32.000 At the top level schools, Ivy League schools, they almost all say, oh, no, we're basically naturally good.

00:21:36.000 We'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.

00:21:45.000 But it's all the systems around us that corrupt us.

00:21:47.000 And 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.

00:21:55.000 And they do so by saying, well, it's all society's fault.

00:21:58.000 It'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.

00:22:07.000 Rousseau is the source of that.

00:22:09.000 If you take a look, elaborate on that.

00:22:11.000 Rousseau is the source.

00:22:12.000 If you look, actually, I wish I knew we were going in this direction.

00:22:15.000 I 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.

00:22:23.000 He wants to essentially shift the blame of all of our vices and all of our neuroses on civil society.

00:22:30.000 And specifically, as I said, Locke.

00:22:32.000 And for him, Locke symbolizes capitalism.

00:22:35.000 If 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.

00:22:46.000 This is why it leads to revolutionary ire.

00:22:49.000 If 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.

00:23:04.000 And that's why his thought is still with us today.

00:23:05.000 He's extremely important and very influential.

00:23:08.000 And very of these thinkers.

00:23:10.000 And very seductive for someone that might not be.

00:23:13.000 He's a beautiful writer.

00:23:14.000 He's an absolutely beautiful writer.

00:23:16.000 And he knows how to appeal to conflicts that almost anybody living anywhere can appeal to.

00:23:23.000 And so he's very good.

00:23:24.000 He knew his ancients and his early modern thinkers.

00:23:28.000 He's an incredible reasoner.

00:23:31.000 And he's just seductive and he's extremely powerful.

00:23:35.000 So we look at Rousseau, and you mentioned this.

00:23:37.000 I want to connect all this for our listeners.

00:23:39.000 Is Rousseau heavily influenced what we would now know as the communists, the socialists, the German historicists?

00:23:48.000 Can you draw that line?

00:23:49.000 Because a lot of people say, Charlie, how does somebody think socialism can work?

00:23:53.000 I say, well, you really got to go back a little bit and understand their view of human nature and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and how...

00:24:00.000 There's this idea that it's the external, not the internal soul, that is the chief thing to blame.

00:24:06.000 Can you kind of do a little bit of a kind of line of succession?

00:24:09.000 Rousseau influenced who, who influenced who?

00:24:12.000 Absolutely.

00:24:13.000 Believe it or not, Rousseau influenced all of those, even though they are in competition with each other.

00:24:20.000 Nationalism grows out of Rousseau.

00:24:22.000 Really?

00:24:23.000 Absolutely.

00:24:24.000 The social contract is a very nationalistic organization.

00:24:30.000 Communism has its roots in Rousseau.

00:24:34.000 Rousseau's critiques of commerce inspired Marx, and everybody knows that.

00:24:39.000 Rousseau's view of how man develops or sometimes even regresses in history inspired Hegel.

00:24:46.000 All three cite him.

00:24:50.000 You would be hard pressed not to see people like, for example, Frederick Nietzsche, who were very influential in the Nazis, and he cites Rousseau.

00:24:57.000 So what's amazing about Rousseau, and Leo Strauss once described him as the equivalent of a volcanic eruption.

00:25:03.000 And what he meant by that is if you consider lava to be fragments of his influence, it went everywhere.

00:25:09.000 Depending on which fragment you caught, you ran away with some aspect of Rousseau.

00:25:15.000 Now, why do I say that modern nationalism was influenced by Rousseau?

00:25:20.000 Because the national socialists were in reaction to capitalism and communism.

00:25:26.000 And Rousseau helps to lay the foundation for that.

00:25:28.000 Now, it gets filtered through other thinkers and, of course, through their own ideology.

00:25:34.000 But oddly enough, everybody took what they wanted out of Rousseau.

00:25:37.000 Marx takes materialism out of Rousseau in a critique of John Locke and then turns it in the direction of communism.

00:25:45.000 And 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.

00:25:59.000 What they all have in common is a revolutionary spirit because there's a promise that in the future, things will get better.

00:26:07.000 They disagree on what that good is, but you're not going to find that optimism in Plato.

00:26:12.000 In the Republic, there's a declension of regimes.

00:26:15.000 In other words, Plato starts with a perfect regime and then shows you a thousand ways it can go wrong.

00:26:20.000 By the end of the Republic, you're purified of political idealism.

00:26:24.000 In Aristotle, Aristotle has the ideal regime and then the practical regime.

00:26:29.000 By the time you finish with the book, you realize that politics and idealism should never mix.

00:26:35.000 It'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.

00:26:48.000 That makes a very dangerous combination for our times.

00:26:51.000 And 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.

00:27:05.000 And his biography is really interesting.

00:27:07.000 Can you just take like a minute and just, he lived a really weird life.

00:27:12.000 I just think it's interesting for people to know.

00:27:14.000 He had many children.

00:27:15.000 He orphaned them.

00:27:16.000 He's famous for that.

00:27:17.000 And of course, then writes a book on how you ought to raise a child.

00:27:20.000 Yeah, I know.

00:27:22.000 But he was kind of an adulterer.

00:27:24.000 He's a Flanderer, I should say.

00:27:25.000 He was all over the place.

00:27:26.000 No, that is true.

00:27:28.000 He had some very famous escapades with very wealthy women.

00:27:34.000 He had a falling out with David Hume.

00:27:37.000 It's not exactly clear over what Hume thought he was a bit temperamental.

00:27:42.000 But 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.

00:27:51.000 I would consider him a distorted genius, but he's quite a reasoner.

00:27:58.000 There are some valid criticisms that he puts forward, but in the end, I think his philosophy is just fundamentally incoherent.

00:28:03.000 So let's go to Locke.

00:28:05.000 So Locke was a major inspiration for the founding fathers.

00:28:10.000 In fact, Thomas Jefferson wanted to have life, liberty, and property, which I think would have been a copy-paste right out of Locke.

00:28:18.000 Talk about how Locke really inspired the philosophical foundation for many of our founding fathers of this great country.

00:28:27.000 So 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.

00:28:39.000 I believe the Bible was number one, and Locke was like number two or three.

00:28:44.000 So it's pretty evident that Locke's influence is all over the founding.

00:28:48.000 The 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.

00:28:57.000 And that the purpose, and here's the real emphasis: the purpose of government is not to give us these rights.

00:29:03.000 That's not where they come from.

00:29:05.000 Once you understand that nature has provided us rights, then the purpose of government is to protect those.

00:29:13.000 And so the primacy of the individual in the community of which we're a part plays a massive role in Locke.

00:29:19.000 And then it helps define what the proper end of government ought to be, and that is to protect those rights.

00:29:25.000 The other thing they took from him is also the separation of powers.

00:29:28.000 Again, 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.

00:29:41.000 And so I would say Locke's natural right teaching is essential and it's really the core in many ways.

00:29:47.000 It was as my friend and colleague in our department, Tom West, recently wrote a book on a political theory of the American founding.

00:29:53.000 And he said, look, they disagreed on many things, but there was an obvious consensus among them.

00:29:58.000 And 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.

00:30:13.000 Every one of these thinkers was right about something.

00:30:16.000 I think more were right about more than others, obviously.

00:30:19.000 But 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.

00:30:26.000 And we have to have you back on because this is.

00:30:28.000 I was going to say, man, you're going to have me back for Machiavelli.

00:30:30.000 He's great.

00:30:31.000 Well, and I think he can be great, I think, if you apply it correctly.

00:30:36.000 It could be misapplied.

00:30:37.000 So 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.

00:30:52.000 Was Hobbes right about that?

00:30:54.000 And 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.

00:31:05.000 It's kind of this ever-present sort of Damocles.

00:31:08.000 What do you think about that?

00:31:09.000 Well, see, this is why I prefer Locke to Hobbes, and I like them both.

00:31:14.000 The example that you're providing is essentially, this is what Hobbes would say.

00:31:18.000 You see, Charlie, you just proved my point.

00:31:21.000 When given a choice between security and liberty, what are people all around us choosing?

00:31:28.000 Security.

00:31:29.000 Safety is right.

00:31:29.000 So you've just made my point, Hobbes would say.

00:31:31.000 Now, Locke would say, though, rights are even more fundamental.

00:31:35.000 I 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.

00:31:45.000 There's still fear.

00:31:46.000 There's still politics.

00:31:47.000 There's still the necessity for war. 0.91

00:31:49.000 He describes conditions among nations as a state of war.

00:31:52.000 He doesn't assume that you'll ever have this kind of global peace.

00:31:56.000 So there is a hard teaching at Hobbes.

00:31:58.000 I would say what you're really... seeing is the effects of Montesquieu.

00:32:01.000 Montesquieu is the thinker who argued that human nature is fundamentally timid.

00:32:07.000 Hobbes did not think human nature was fundamentally timid.

00:32:10.000 He thought that the problem with human nature is that it's not timid.

00:32:13.000 So 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.

00:32:28.000 So I would say there's still a harder edge in Hobbes and Locke that's virtually absent in Montesquieu.

00:32:33.000 His state of nature, for example, Hobbes, we're fighting and killing and slaughtering each other.

00:32:38.000 In Montesquieu, he presents a picture equivalent of something like Disney's Bambi.

00:32:43.000 We're just these timid creatures.

00:32:44.000 We break a twig under our foot and we flee.

00:32:47.000 And his argument there is that by nature, we're really timid.

00:32:50.000 And so what we want is a tranquil society.

00:32:53.000 With Hobbes, there's an emphasis on fear.

00:32:54.000 That's not tranquility.

00:32:56.000 So now I want to close this, and this will be a nice teaser to the next conversation we have.

00:33:00.000 I just want to remind people, go to charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:33:03.000 It's one thing to get in political debates and all this, but it is clarifying and it is satisfying to know where these ideas came from.

00:33:12.000 You can all of a sudden realize who their inspirations were, whether they realize it or not.

00:33:16.000 And you understand that there's been thousands of years of thinking and pondering over these ideas, and you could derive wisdom for it.

00:33:25.000 And Hillsdale College is the only place that has done this in a way that I've seen.

00:33:29.000 It's super amazing.

00:33:30.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com, CharlieForhillsdale.com.

00:33:34.000 Okay, 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.

00:33:43.000 Machiavelli wrote, I think, right near 1519 or something, 1520-ish, right?

00:33:48.000 And some people would say that he kind of started the Enlightenment.

00:33:51.000 I don't know if you agree with that or not.

00:33:53.000 I heard, I think it was Michael Anton say that recently.

00:33:57.000 Tell 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.

00:34:06.000 Okay, well, Machiavelli was also immensely influential, not just simply on the founding, but just in shaping the contours of the Enlightenment.

00:34:13.000 When I say I love him, I love him the way I love all great thinkers.

00:34:16.000 There's so much to really think about.

00:34:18.000 I'm also working on a book in which he plays a big role.

00:34:21.000 So that's why I lit up.

00:34:23.000 Machiavelli was an actually practicing political statesman.

00:34:27.000 And it was only when he was in exile that he turned to writing The Prince and The Art of War and the Discourses.

00:34:34.000 He essentially wrote for a number of reasons.

00:34:37.000 One, to correct what he saw was defective in the Renaissance, and that was just the aesthetics of trying to restore ancient art and beauty.

00:34:44.000 He 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.

00:34:56.000 And so all, and during the Renaissance, there was an attempt to synthesize Christianity with classical virtue, and Machiavelli calls them out on that.

00:35:04.000 They're just two incompatible worldviews.

00:35:06.000 You're going to have to pick one, but you can't try to synthesize both.

00:35:10.000 And 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.

00:35:33.000 And that is to make philosophy practical, make it ideological.

00:35:37.000 In Plato and Aristotle, there's too much prudence baked into their theory.

00:35:42.000 Whereas with Machiavelli, his emphasis on founding is designed to give us a sense of the character of philosophy.

00:35:48.000 It's not necessarily theoretical and good in itself, or any of these abstractions that you often hear among the ancients.

00:35:55.000 For Machiavelli, the purpose of politics is to satisfy man's natural desire for acquisition and conquest.

00:36:02.000 And that shapes the rest of Western civilization once he enters that.

00:36:06.000 Then you can start seeing the thinkers we just discussed in many ways reacting to him.

00:36:10.000 So it just never ends.

00:36:12.000 It's a long conversation.

00:36:13.000 He said, why are we talking about all these imaginary republics?

00:36:16.000 We know what we want.

00:36:17.000 Let's go get it.

00:36:18.000 Why are we talking about the city in the clouds?

00:36:20.000 I mean, come on.

00:36:22.000 We know what we want.

00:36:23.000 And 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.

00:36:32.000 Machiavelli's not interested in that.

00:36:34.000 He wants to take us away from the perfect regime to the imperfect and how it can perhaps be improved upon.

00:36:39.000 And 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.

00:36:52.000 So he's pretty remarkable.

00:36:54.000 And talk a little bit about the circumstances he wrote in.

00:36:57.000 Warring Italian city-states, kind of bedlock.

00:37:02.000 He tells us in the discourses, and if you also read Marsilius of Padua, who wrote before him, Italy was a complete dysfunctional state.

00:37:10.000 It was disunited.

00:37:11.000 The 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.

00:37:24.000 You can see this in Shakespeare's play, King John.

00:37:26.000 In 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.

00:37:35.000 Well, that's the world in which Machiavelli is born and operating in.

00:37:38.000 And 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.

00:37:50.000 And 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. 0.58

00:37:59.000 Pretty remarkable.

00:38:00.000 It's amazing.

00:38:01.000 So just to recap, we went through social contract theory.

00:38:04.000 We talked about a little bit, just very introductory, of Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, and then we just did a little bit of Machiavelli.

00:38:11.000 And so let's tease people going into this next conversation that you and I will have.

00:38:17.000 The significance and the implication that Machiavelli has had on modern politics is what?

00:38:25.000 Incalculable.

00:38:26.000 I can't even measure it.

00:38:28.000 There's not a thinker after him worth reading who isn't aware of him.

00:38:32.000 And I'll leave you with this.

00:38:33.000 Montesquieu, like Locke, was one of the most influential writers in the American founding.

00:38:38.000 The only person he ever says we need to combat his influence is Machiavelli.

00:38:44.000 And that's one of the most towering geniuses of the Enlightenment.

00:38:48.000 Montesquieu writes, in the spirit of the laws, we have yet to cure ourselves of Machiavellianism.

00:38:53.000 So when a genius like Montesquieu points to Machiavelli as the most influential of the time, that's when I listen.

00:39:01.000 So he's pretty credible.

00:39:03.000 And according to Montesquieu, he is the thinker of their time and ours in many ways.

00:39:07.000 Well, 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.

00:39:22.000 And 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.

00:39:31.000 Doctor, I've enjoyed this conversation.

00:39:33.000 Anything you want to plug?

00:39:34.000 A book?

00:39:34.000 Any way that people can support you?

00:39:36.000 No, no, I just want to thank you for your support of the college.

00:39:39.000 It means the world to us.

00:39:40.000 And it's a delight to even hear that you're so engaged in the courses that you're working your way through it.

00:39:45.000 The only thing I think that's missing, Charlie, is a master's degree, at least a PhD from Hillsdale College.

00:39:50.000 So you might want to consider that, okay?

00:39:53.000 I will.

00:39:53.000 I just, I'll skip over the undergrad and then we'll go over there.

00:39:57.000 So, but I, I, all kidding aside, Charlie for Hillsdale.com.

00:40:02.000 I 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.

00:40:13.000 It's deep stuff, but it's digestible and it's just terrific.

00:40:16.000 So thank you, Doctor, so much.

00:40:18.000 We'll talk to you soon.

00:40:19.000 Great to see you.

00:40:20.000 Take care.

00:40:20.000 Thanks.

00:40:23.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:40:24.000 Email us your thoughts at freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.

00:40:31.000 God bless you guys.

00:40:32.000 Speak to you soon.

00:40:35.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - September 18, 2021

3 Great Thinkers Who Inspired and Horrified the Founding Fathers with Dr. Khalil Habib

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