Anthony Esolen on the Hobbesian view of mankind

The philosopher Thomas Hobbs, for one, claimed that the only way men live under an uneasy truce would be for them to concede their natural "rights" to all goods.  We all, he argued, have an equal claim to the plums from that tree, the iron in that hill, John's wife, or Mary's gold.  Such equality breeds war.  So we yield our claims up to a sovereign state - the so-called "Leviathan."

Hobbes did not argue that the Leviathan had to be ruled by a divinely anointed king.  There was no divine anointing.  There need not even be a king; a council might serve as well.  The point is that Leviathan's will is absolute.  The unitary state is a divinity by comparison with the individual.  It alone has rights.  It can determine what or how much you will own.  It can determine whom and how you will worship.  It directs them, since men are, individually, random atoms of willfulness, colliding against one another in a meaningless existence.  There is, as the nominalists said, no such thing as "mankind" except as a convenient term, and no such thing as human nature; only individual human beings seeking pleasure and fleeing pain.  Nature cannot guide us here.  For the life of natural man, said Hobbes in his most famous sentence, in that ugly non-Eden before the rise of the Leviathan, is embroiled in the war of all against all.  It is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

~ Anthony Esolen, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization

Anthony Esolen on civilization

... Goodness and beauty spring from a care for the small and the local, and not from a fascination with grand political and social abstractions.

~ Anthony Esolen, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, p. 268

Alexis de Tocqueville on man's passion for equality

There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
 

(Cited by Anthony Esolen in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, p. 229.)