Thomas Hobbes
Fascist Exponent of
Enlightement Science
by Brian Lantz
Thomas Hobbes (center), Paolo Sarpi (left), and Galileo Galilei.
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Fidelio, Vol. V, No, 1. Spring 1996
This article is reprinted from the Spring 1996 issue of FIDELIO Magazine.

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Thomas Hobbes: Fascist Exponent of Enlightement Science

by Brian Lantz

In his May 10, 1982 speech to the British Foreign service assembled at the Royal Institute of International Affairs’ Chatham House, Henry Kissinger lauded the “Hobbesian” premise of British foreign policy. That Kissinger was correct in identifying the axiomatics of British foreign policy as “Hobbesian,” should alert the reader to the significance of the doctrines of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), to the events unfolding now, three hundred and fifty years later, as Current History.

Over the past century, for geopolitical purposes, the British oligarchy has orchestrated a true Hobbesian “war of each against all,” bringing about two world wars and innumerable regional conflicts including, most recently, the horrors of Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The literally fascist legislative agenda of Conservative Revolutionaries Newt Gingrich and Sen. Phil Gramm, under the sponsorship of various Mont Perlin Society-connected thinktanks, underscores the significance of “Sir” Kissinger’s Hobbesian remark for domestic politics within the United States itself.

Like his homosexual lover Francis Bacon and fellow British empiricist John Locke, Thomas Hobbes was deployed by the then Venice-centered oligarchy against the ideas of the Golden Renaissance, which had been set in motion under the influence of Nicolaus of Cusa at the 1439 Council of Florence. He is most notorious nowadays for the views expressed in his Leviathan, or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, published in 1651, during the consolidation of Oliver Cromwell’s rule. There, Hobbes laid out a justification for oligarchic dictatorship, or fascism, based upon the need to restrain the uncontrollable violence inherent in man’s nature. He wrote:

[D]uring the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time where in the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war ... .

Let him therefore consider with himself—when taking a journey he arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied, when going to sleep he locks his doors, when even in his house he locks his chests, and this when he knows there be laws and public officers, armed to revenge all injuries shall be done him—what opinion he has of his fellow subjects when he rides armed, of his fellow citizens when he locks his doors, and of his children and servants when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The desires and other passions of man are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions till they know a law that forbids them ... . (Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 13)

What is not so well known is that Thomas Hobbes derived his concepts of moral and civil philosophy from what passes today as modern “classroom mathematics”—that is, from the neo-Aristotelian, algebraic method that was promoted to counter the influence of Renaissance Christian Platonism. In a comment on his De Cive (1642), Hobbes stated what his intellectual plan of action had been:

I was studying philosophy for my mind’s sake, and I had gathered together its first elements in all kinds; I thought to have written them, so as in the first I would have treated of body and its general properties; in the second of man and his special faculties and affections; in the third, of civil government and the duties of subjects. Wherefore the first section would have contained the first philosophy, and certain elements of physic; in it we would have considered the reasons of time, place, cause, power, relation, proportion, quantity, figure, and motion. In the second, we would have been conversant about imagination, memory, intellect, ratiocination, appetite, will, good and evil, honest and dishonest, and the like. ... It so happened in the interim, that my country, some few years before the civil wars did rage, was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and the obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an approaching war; and was the cause which all those other matters deferred, ripened and plucked from me this third part. Therefore it happens, that what was last in order, is yet come forth first in time.

Hobbes, a wild-eyed materialist for whom the ultimate explanation of any action in nature, or as an expression of human nature, lay only in terms of material bodies and the motion of those bodies, stated his extreme views so outrageously, that they are useful in awakening us to the danger inherent in the common way of thinking today.

Hobbes set out to crudely recast philosophy, which up to the Seventeenth-century, philosophy was still considered the interrelated study of all profound scientific, civil, and moral questions. Thus, in his Elementa Philosophiae Secto Prima de Corpore (Elements of Philosophy, Section I Of Body, hereafter De Corpore), completed prior to the publication of his infamous Leviathan, Hobbes declared philosophy to be only “such knowledge of effects or appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes or generation: And again, of such causes or generations as may be from knowing first their effects.”

Hobbes on Metaphor

In supplying the axiomatic basis for his fascist political theory, Thomas Hobbes claimed that there were no such things as universals, but only names; and that truth and falsehood were merely the attributes of names, and not things. He presented reason as a kind of arithmetic: As he wrote in Leviathan, “Reason is nothing but the reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed on.” Error is caused by the inconsistent or absurd use of names, he writes, and common causes of error include the confusion of categories, inconsistent definitions, and metaphor, which he classifies as the sixth of the seven common “causes of absurdity” amongst mankind. (Leviathan, chap. 4.)

Hobbes went on to claim that metaphor was one of the gravest threats to that science which is the basis of his social theories:

To conclude, the light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt. (Leviathan, chap. 5)
By ratiocination, Hobbes emphatically did not mean reason, but instead a process akin to arithmetic “addition and subtraction” [See Box, right]. As if attuned to America’s movie-going public, Hobbes argued that all perceived effects are literally attributed to “hard bodies” and their perceived motions. We could graph these hard bodies and their motions, and develop algebraic equations for them. He writes:
We must not therefore think that computation, that is ratiocination, has place only in numbers, as if man were distinguished from other living creatures (which is said to have been the opinion of Pythagoras) by nothing but the faculty of numbering; for magnitude, body, time, degrees of quality, action, conception of proportion, speech, and names (in which all the kinds of philosophy consist) are capable of addition and substraction. ... [E]ffects and the appearances of things to sense, are faculties or powers of bodies. (De Corpore)

How many of these “hard bodies” are there? An infinity says Hobbes, adding that the concept of infinity is incomprehensible to man—for, since man’s nature is finite, we must settle for that which we can understand by means of our senses.

But, if the infinite is incomprehensible to man, how can he act in the image of an infinite Creator God?

Hobbes, Sarpi, and Galileo

Lyndon LaRouche has made the point that Hobbes obsessively developed his arguments based on the axiomatics of the mathematics of the infamous Venetian agent Paolo Sarpi (1551-1623), and his pathetic student Galileo Galilei (1564-1462). Owing to the principles embedded hereditarily in the method of Sarpi, Galileo, et al., modern classroom mathematics would, by rigorous implication, necessarily be consistent with only one form of political economy: the fascist state. And Hobbes proves exactly this, by deriving his fascist political theories from these very axiomatics.

It was the Venetian friar Paolo Sarpi who personally oversaw the assault on Renaissance science and statecraft engendered at the Council of Florence. Sarpi was the head of Venetian intelligence, an intelligence capability known and feared for its efficiency, and utter depravity. Born of an old Venetian oligarchic family, Sarpi became “Theological counselor” to the Venetian Doge and Senate, from which position he orchestrated the religious conflict between Protestant northern Europe and the Catholic south, to the benefit of Venetian finance and political control.

Sarpi gained profound influence in London beginning the reign of James I, based upon the notoriety accorded him by the Vatican. By 1607, he became sole Consultore to the Venetian Senate; when a Papal Interdict had been issued against Venice in 1606, in which Venice was pitted against the Pope over the issue of “sovereignty,” Sarpi’s writings flooded England, sponsored by the printer to King James. “Father Paul” was widely quoted in Anglican sermons and religious treatises. Praised by Francis Bacon, King James I, and others, Sarpi’s direct role in England was not limited only to his influence on Hobbes through Galileo, the Abbé Mersenne, and others of that “scientific” network, but was also promoted by the “Rosicrucian” networks of Bacon and Fludd, who controlled the court of James I.

The Fifteenth-century Renaissance had overthrown the “chains of illusion” of Aristotelian Scholasticism, including the deliberately cultivated superstition of a fixed, earth-centered universe. The feudal order was being eclipsed rapidly by a revolution in the physical sciences, brought forth most notably by Cusa (1401-1464), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Their work yielded fruit in the breakthroughs in astronomy accompanying the mastery of the navigation of the globe, and in the harnessing of new sources of power for waterworks, transportation, and machine design. That the principles of natural science had been made intelligible, and creative reason itself was becoming intelligible to men and women through the emergence of the republican nation-state, doomed the oligarchical system.

Paolo Sarpi’s intent, for which he utilized Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and others, was to bury Cusa’s Platonic, constructive geometric approach in the sciences, according to which man attempts to ever more perfectly, and nobly, comprehend the reason behind phenomena. In its place, Sarpi called for setting down the rules of fixed, pair-wise, Euclidian, “relationships,” whose inferred pair-wise “interactions” were set against a dead backdrop of nothingness. This formal geometry could then be utilized to account for bodies and their motion in space. And to this end, Sarpi created his “scientist” Galileo Galilei.

There can be no question as to Sarpi’s role in promoting Galileo, as Galileo himself acknowledged the powerful Venetian as “Il mio padre e maestro” (“my father and my master”), adding that “[i]t can be said without exaggeration, that no one in Europe surpasses Master Paolo Sarpi in the knowledge of the science of mathematics.” Galileo’s insistence on the existence of the perfect vacuum, as the “pure” context in which to frame “objective laws” governing the motion of falling bodies, for instance, was driven by Sarpi’s effort to wipe out the scientific understanding that an intelligible, transfinite generating principle must bound apparent Euclidian space.

It was upon the axioms of Sarpi and Galileo’s mathematical physics, that Hobbes would pursue his moral philosophy,

in which we are to consider the motions of the mind, namely, appetite, aversion, love, benevolence, hope, fear, anger, emulation, envy, etc; what cause they have and of what they be causes. And the reason why these are to be considered after physics is, that they have their causes in sense and imagination, which are the subject of physical contemplation. (De Corpore)

Hobbes’ natural philosophy led directly to his notorious view of man in civil society, as Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm express it today. And because his moral philosophy reduced human beings to individual personalities engaged in atomized behavior, Hobbes asserted that greed and fear were the true qualities of human society.

If we examine Paolo Sarpi’s writings, we will find present already the political theory of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Hobbes’ view of man-as-a-born-criminal, is nothing but an amplification of Fra Sarpi’s radical-positivist views—for Sarpi himself had already written that man was an animal, and the most imperfect one at that. Sarpi claimed that there existed in every individual what he called the libido dominandi—a claim for which he might be called the father of the Freudian “id.” For Sarpi, the libido inevitably dominates the individual personality and his actions:

It happens with everything good and well instituted, that human malice progressively devises methods of operating abusively and of rendering insupportable what was established to a good end and with the highest principles.

Sarpi further argued, in an extensive correspondence with scientists, theologians, and royal households throughout Europe, that philosophy—meaning the scientific method of Plato, St. Augustine, Cusa, and Kepler—would only destroy man’s instinctive ability to act to meet the problems of the here and now. Rather than its representing the spark of divinity in human nature, he said that Augustinian Platonic philosophy was a symptom of corruption. Against the backdrop of Venetian-orchestrated betrayal, wars, destabilizations, and assassinations, Sarpi argued that the essential condition for human knowledge, was experience; but by experience, he meant merely the literal sense-perception of physical objects. Hence, Sarpi doubted the existence—at least as an object of knowledge—of any non-material “thing,” and held universal concepts such as love, beauty, or truth, to be useless “metaphysics.” Knowledge was to be measured for its utility; after all, said Sarpi, Venetians “despise knowledge of things of which we have no need.”

To the end of promoting the oligarchical order, Sarpi advocated a method of systematic thinking guaranteed to abort new ideas:

There are four modes of philosophizing: the first with reason alone, the second with sense alone, the third with reason first and then sense, the fourth beginning with sense and ending with reason. The first is the worst, because from it we know what we would like to be, not what is. The third is bad because we many times distort what is into what we would like, rather than adjusting what we would like to what is. The second is true but crude, permitting us to know little, and that rather of things than of their causes. The fourth is the best we can have in this miserable life.

It is but a brief distance from the “miserable life” of the materialist Sarpi, to the oft-quoted assessment of Hobbes’ Leviathan, that the life of man is “nasty, brutish, and short.” On the eve of the Venetian-orchestrated Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Sarpi was to tell his correspondents that God himself “acts without discourse”—that is, without reason. In what should have been taken as expressing Venice’s intent towards all of Europe, Father Sarpi wrote that he believed uncertainty and instability to be the only universal principles.

‘Utility’ versus Truth

What Thomas Hobbes wrote, he wrote as a partisan for the emerging, newly London-centered “Venetian Party” of transplanted Venetian finance. The Levant Company had, with the aide of Venice, become dominant in the Middle East trade, dominating the Mediterranean; the British East India Company was further enriching the new financial oligarchy, centered in the autonomous City of London. It is on their behalf that Hobbes baldly asserted that the “utility” of his method had been proven already by the breakthroughs of Western Civilization, “namely, of measuring matter and of making instruments for all uses; of calculating of celestial motions ... .”

The average reader today would probably be buffaloed by this assertion of Hobbes. Nowadays, the algebraic, or statistical, method is applied to all fields of “philosophy,” including the sciences, economics, and social behavior. But if the truth be told, had Thomas Hobbes’ “ratiocination” actually been the premise of science and statecraft in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth centuries, we would not be alive today. In fact, the leading scientists, statesmen, and theologians of the late-Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries, would have considered Hobbes’ scribbling to be the product of a mentally disturbed individual.

For example, as Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized, the discoveries in science and technology that arose in the Renaissance, and continue down to this day, are based upon the fundamental philosophical contribution of Nicolaus of Cusa, and it is upon the work of Cusa that the possibility of a comprehensible mathematical physics depends. Cusa’s profound contribution was later advanced by the indispensable discoveries, and hard work, of such individuals as Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Kepler.

What you see is, emphatically, not what exists. For example, Cusa discovered why it was impossible to “square the circle” through algebraic methods, thereby discovering what we know today as the transcendental numbers. Why? Because a linear approximation of curvature is never curvature; circular action is not reducible to straight-line action. We might imagine that a regular polygon with a million sides would, “for all practical purposes,” be a circle; but that would be to ignore the truth. The paradox—that increasing the number of the polygon’s sides would widen, rather than close, the gulf between the rectilnear figure and the circle—set the stage for a truthseeking Nicolaus of Cusa to recognize how circular action represented a higher order of function than linear action in the universe. Further, Cusa grasped that the characteristics of change in the universe must be coherent with that very creative power of the human mind which allowed him to discover a type of number—π—which transcends the power of algebraic methods. Whole families of non-algebraic curves, such as the cycloid, catenary, and tractrix, was found to exist in the physical universe, and they were subsequently investigated by such scientists as Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, G.W. Leibniz, (See Box on Leibniz Below) and Jean Bernoulli. Action in the universe is non-linear, non-algebraic. As LaRouche writes:

Hobbes, Leibniz, and Transfinite Reason

To his dying day, Hobbes maintained a violent polemic that the circle could readily be squared, if only metaphysics were left out of the picture—a proposition which is not only known to be false by every schoolchild today, but which was aimed squarely at the concept of transfinite reason to be found in the seminal scientific ideas of Nicolaus of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and G.W. Leibniz. As for knowledge of the whole, coherent universe, at the extremes of the micro and macro levels, Hobbes argued that to be a cipher to man, given man’s finite nature. In the Epistle Dedicatory to his Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics, a defense of his indefensible geometric proofs, written late in his life, Hobbes says:

Geometry is ... demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable because we make the commonwealth ourselves. But because of natural bodies we know not the construction, but seek it from effects, there lies no demonstration of what the causes be we seek for, but only for what they may be.

Thus Hobbes, like his mentors Paolo Sarpi and Galileo, placed knowledge of the universe and its causes, and of God himself, beyond man’s reach.

The great G.W. Leibniz attempted, both in his youth and later in life, to strike up a correspondence with Hobbes, and there survive a number of Leibniz’s unanswered letters. However, in his voluminous writings, Leibniz again and again exposed the fraud of Hobbes, as well as of Newton, Descartes, and others, who promoted an evil, axiomatic principle: that the universe, and all action in it, is completely comprehensible as linear action occurring in a continuous, infinitely extended time and space. Leibniz knew this to be contrary to reason, as had Cusa and Kepler implicitly before him:

In a word, so far as the details of phenomena are concerned, everything takes place in the body as if the evil doctrine of those who believe, with Epicurus and Hobbes, that the soul is material were true, or as if man himself were only a body or an automaton. These materials have thus extended to man as well what the Cartesians have held regarding all other animals, having shown in fact that nothing is done by man, with his whole reason, which is not a play of images, passions, and motions in the body. (From “Reply to the Thoughts on the System of Preestablished Harmony Contained in the Second Edition of Mr. Bayle’s Critical Dictionary, Article Rorarius”)

As for Hobbes’ political theory, it was Leibniz who pointed out, that if the evil ideas of the “sharpwitted Hobbes” were ever to prevail, “there would be out-and-out anarchy.” (Caesarinus Furstenerius De Suprematu Principum, 1677)

[K]nowledge begins by rising above contemplation of blind faith in sense-experience, to examining the states of consciousness associated with judging sense-experience. ... This is ... illustrated by Nicolaus of Cusa’s revolutionary solution to Archimedes’ formulation of the paradoxical chore of squaring the circle. By leaping directly to the outer limit of a process of generating ever-more many-sided, regular, inscribed and circumscribed polygons, it is shown that such an increasingly precise method for estimated a numerical value of π could never bring congruence between the perimeters of the polygon and that of the circle. The two are of different species, the principle of circular action the superior species bounding “externally” the process of generating the polygons.

In that circa A.C.E. 1440 discovery by Cusa, we have the axiomatic germ of Leibniz and Jean Bernoulli’s demonstration of a non-algebraic form of universal least action. ... Cusa’s discovery of the absolute distinction between a circle and circular action, the germ of modern transcendental functions, is taken as an intelligible example of the principle of hypothesis. (Physical economy is the basis of human knowledge, Part II, Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 21, No. 10, March 4, 1994, pp. 17-18)

Hobbes, however, rejected Cusa’s intelligible method of hypothesis, and its implications for the ordering of the universe, because he had no interest in the why and how of God’s laws. He was prepared to literally explain away “any effect.” Of the equivalence of the circle to a series of inscribed polygons, Hobbes wrote:

We know, therefore, that from such generation proceeds a figure, from whose one middle point all the extreme points are reached unto by equal radii. And in like manner, by knowing first what figure is set before us, we may come by ratiocination to some generation of the same, though perhaps not that by which it was made, yet that by which it might have been made; for he that knows that a circle has the property above declared, will easily know whether a body carried about, as is said, will generate a circle or no.
(DeCorpore)

Hobbes and Galileo

All of Hobbes’ significant writings followed his third trip to Europe, in 1635, when he met with Galileo Galilei and many others in the extensive network created by the deceased Paolo Sarpi. Galileo himself was in his early seventies at the time Hobbes visited him in Italy. Hobbes was forty-seven years old, and had published almost nothing, only a translation of Thucydides. His main role at that time was as a retainer and tutor of the Cavendish estate, including of the Duke of Newcastle, closely allied to England’s King Charles I. It was on the strength of these connections—particularly Charles Cavendish, who provided Hobbes with crucial introductions, including to Sarpi intimate Abbé Mersenne—that Hobbes met with Galileo.

By the time of his return to England in 1636, Hobbes had been accepted (as he proudly states in his Autobiography) as “numbered among the philosophers.” In 1644, Hobbes’ Tractatus Opticus appeared in Paris; in 1647, his Elementa Philosophica de Cive in Amsterdam (London, 1651). In 1650, De Corpore Politicio (Elements of Law) appeared in London, followed by the infamous Leviathan in 1651, and Elementa Philosophiae Secto Pima de Corpore in 1655.

Galileo Galilei’s works had begun to be introduced into England in the first decade of the 1600’s. His little book, Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), was published in Venice in March 1610, as part of Sarpi’s strategic intervention into European science. Galileo was then forty-six years old, having held the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua for eighteen years. Galileo had earlier broken off all correspondence with Johannes Kepler, after the publication of Kepler’s revolutionary Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1597; until his death, Galileo would deny Kepler’s discovery that the planetary orbits were elliptical.

In the Starry Messenger, Galileo revealed to an incredulous Europe the discovery of the four moons of Jupiter, and the appearance of the surface of the moon as seen through a telescope. These and other empirical findings were credited to Galileo’s work with the new “spyglass”—a telescope provided to Galileo by none other than Paolo Sarpi himself. It was the circulation throughout Europe of the Starry Messenger that made Galileo famous. His other works, following upon the success of Starry Messenger, were means for Paolo Sarpi to promote the outlook by which he intended to takeover of science from the inside, including in England.

Galileo’s scientific method was the same as that later adopted by Hobbes. In 1624, for example, Galileo published his much-heralded scientific manifesto, The Assayer, and it met with immense publishing success, circulating throughout Europe, including England, just as the Thirty Years War was engulfing the Continent. In it he wrote:

[W]henever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments. ...

To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds, I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and armpits.

For Galileo, only bodies and their motion exist—and the numbers for counting and measuring them! These bodies are all composed of a prima materia (prime matter), itself made up of “infinitely small, indivisible constituents.” These “infinitely small” bodies allowed Galileo to asymptotically approximate a description of any phenomena, without considering that the phenomena was, causally, a different species of existent. Just make the bodies smaller, and imagine enough of them, and you can, as the expression goes, “cover all the bases.” At the same time, holding to the existence of “absolutely indivisible atoms” allowed Galileo to describe all “things” as built up of other hard-ball “things.” Given that the universe it completely composed of Galileo’s prima materia, fundamental change, that is, development, cannot occur—only change of place.

Similarly, hear what Galileo had to say about the issue of squaring the circle, from his First Book of Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences:

Salvadore:: If now the change which takes place when you bend a line at angles so as to form now a square, now an octagon, now a polygon of forty, a hundred, or a thousand angles, is sufficient to bring into actuality the four, eight, forty, hundred, and thousand parts which, according to you, existed at first only potentially in the straight line, may I not say with equal right, that, when I have bent the straight line into a polygon having an infinite number of sides, i.e., into a circle, I have reduced to actuality that infinite number of parts which you claimed, while it was straight, were contained in it only potentially?

Galileo insisted, through his character Salvadore, that the circle was commensurable with the straight line. Despite Nicolaus of Cusa’s discovery, eighty-odd years earlier, that circular action was of a different species than that of straight-line, linear action, and superior thereto, Galileo insisted, Paolo Sarpi insisted, that a circle could be equated to an infinitely sided polygon. That the mode of generating a circle and a polygon are qualitatively different is to be ignored; for these neo-Aristotelians, hypotheses are not required.

In Conclusion

Hobbes betrayed England to Venice, according to Paolo Sarpi’s design. And Hobbes did it arguing, in De Cive as well as in the Leviathan, that England’s bloody tumult, actually orchestrated from the outside by Venetian intelligence, was proof that England’s civil order must be replaced by an oligarchic dictatorship modeled on that of Venice. The evil Hobbes claimed that the Tudor impulse for statecraft, which had been based on the practice of the French nation in the reign of Louis XI, was proven to be a failure by the middle of the Seventeenth century, because such champions of the nation-state commonwealth as Erasmus, Thomas More, and Jean Bodin had premised their republican policies on a false, idealistic view of man.

The end of the Sixteenth century, through the Seventeenth, was disastrous for England, embracing the downfall of the reactionary Stuarts, Oliver Cromwell’s misnomered “Commonwealth,” and the “Glorious Revolution”—that final coup d’etat which brought Venice’s House of Orange to the English throne. Thomas Hobbes, who lived for nearly a century, was there through much of it, to organize for the cold-blooded application to “ethics” and “civil philosophy” of the “New Sciences” of Galileo Galilei.

Hobbes did not live to see the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. John Locke, however, did. Locke, the son of Puritans and a likely personal witness of the beheading of Charles II, took the ideas of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and elaborated those principles for the purposes of the new and evil British empire. Long before he authored his philosophical Treatises, he had writtten the constitution for Lord Shaftesbury’s slave colony of South Carolina.

While Sarpi, Hobbes, and Locke were successful in England in suppressing the ideas of Renaissance statecraft and science which were based upon the humanist conception of man in the image of God, those ideas were successfully exported to create the American Republic. Worldwide, humanity has increased its numbers to over five billion souls. Although humanity today may be truly threatened with an Hobbesian nightmare, man’s God-given power of creative reason, and the nature of God’s laws, is the means by which we defeat the evil of algebraic “classroom mathematics.”

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