A Sound of Sheer Silence

History is the story we tell about our present, using the past as the main characters. Up until I was ten, I lived in New Jersey.  For those readers who do not live in the United States, New Jersey is a small state (in terms of area, not population) located between two large metropolitan areas--New York and Philadelphia.  Where we were, in central New Jersey along the coast, we were in the orbit of New York, and so we got all of the New York media and New York oriented content.  And yet, Oceanport was not a suburb, at least in the newly-built post-World War II sense of a suburb.  It was really more of a small town--older, more conservative--that happened to be 90 or so minutes on the train from New York City. Fourth grade was the last year I lived in Oceanport, and for social studies we spent the whole year on New Jersey history.  That study culminated in the fourth grade class putting on a play about New Jersey history.  I think about this play a lot, most...

In January 1968, the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet Offensive, a campaign the profoundly and permanently undermined the American public's confidence in the Vietnam war.  Over 16,000 American soldiers would die in Vietnam over the course of 1968.  In April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  In the spring of 1968, riots swept American cities.  In June, Bobby Kennedy, who was almost surely going to be the Democratic nominee for President in the fall, was assassinated.  Ultimately, in November, former Vice President Richard Nixon, a Republican, defeated then-current Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Given these facts, it is natural to look to 1968 as a model for 2020.  And, those that do that tend to think that this analogy would favor the Republican, Donald Trump.  But I think that is facile.  Yes, there are many parallels between 1968 and 2020, but those parallels point as much against Trump as they point toward him.  And there a...

In 1651, in the middle of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan , or more fully " Leviathan: On the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil ."  Leviathan is a classic of political theory, and is read alongside Locke, Rousseau, and Machiavelli as part of the basis of "early modern" or "Enlightenment" political thinking.  It is also, I think, a deeply misunderstood book.  It's misunderstood because there is a surface-level argument that Hobbes is making (which is the one that everyone focuses on), and then there is a a much more interesting and I think much more relevant argument that he makes under the surface. Hobbes begins his thinking with the notion of "the State of Nature"--what human beings are like without any of the constraints of society.  Unlike those that would follow him (like Locke and especially Rousseau), Hobbes thinks that this State of Nature is unambiguously terrible, expressed ...