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The Charlie Kirk Show
3 Great Thinkers Who Inspired and Horrified the Founding Fathers with Dr. Khalil Habib
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Hey, everybody. Today on the Charlie Kirk show, we have Dr. Khalil Habib. You guys are going to love this conversation, which is brought to you by Hillsdale College, the beacon of the north. And for all things hillsdale, check out charlieforhillsdale.com. that's charlieforhillsdale.Com I just completed my Winston Churchill statesmanship course, and it was so interesting. Taught by Dr. Larry Arne. And, you know, as Aristotle would say, people have a desire to know. He said that I believe in the metaphysics, where he said that every human being desires to know more. Well, people ask me all the time. They say, charlie, what can I do to help save the country? Or, charlie, how do I properly educate my kid, my grandkid? Well, 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. We are calling this the Hour of Liberty. Now, 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 grandmother, you could take one hour a week. That's it. One hour a week, and sit down with your kids and teach them something with all the phones off, they might say, charlie, I don't know what to teach them. Well, I'm looking right now at the Hillsdale College online portfolio. How about this one right here? Let's go to the second world Wars. This 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. They are compelling, they are interesting and will give you the information that you need to be able to teach your kids or your grandkids. How about this one right here@charlieforhillsdale.com?
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it's.
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It's Constitution 201. The progressive rejection of the Founding and the rise of bureaucratic despotism@charlie4hillsdale.com so 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. Do it once a week. That's 52 hours a year. It'll change your kid's life. I'm gonna take every single Hillsdale online course, which is an ambitious promise to say. I've already completed Constitutional 101, Introduction to Aristotle, how to Live a Good Life. I've also finished Winston Churchill and Statesmanship, and I've also finished the Introduction to Western Philosophy. All are terrific. They are easy to go through. It takes some time But I encourage you to do that. Everyone listening, Go sign up and sign your kids up@charlieforhillsdale.com what is social contract theory? What does it mean? We go through Locke, Hobbs, and Rousseau. We dive deep into the ideas and how it applies today. And 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. I love when people learn things. It makes you better prepared and more willing to save this country. Go to charlieforhillsdale.com anytime throughout this broadcast. I want to thank those of you that email us your thoughts freedomarliekirk.com and thank you for supporting our program@charliekirk.com support. Great conversation coming up. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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I want you to know we are
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lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
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Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie.
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He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. With us today is Dr. Habib, whose specialty is political philosophy. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. And he hails from many different places, but of course, Hillsdale College being the most important. Dr. Habib, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
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Charlie, good to be with you.
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So we have so many different topics I want to get into. I just want to remind everyone that you can dive deep into these ideas@charlieforhillsdale.com that's charliefor hillsdale.com okay, so, Dr. Habib, I want to start with some of the basics. 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 lockdown, 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. Tell us what each of them believed, what they had in common, and the implications of that in political philosophy in the modern era.
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B
Sure. Well, I'll just take them chronologically. I think that's the easiest way to do it because in many ways they're responding to each other. And I would say the real groundbreaker is Thomas Hobbes. He writes first, and he's alive during the English Civil War. And that was the inspiration for him to essentially rush series of works out into the public, beginning with his work on citizen in Leviathan. 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. 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. 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. Now, according to Hobbes, the most efficient means of doing that would be a monarchy. And he saw the dissolution of monarchy during the English Civil War. And he wrote a dialogue titled Behemoth. And Behemoth is a character like Leviathan, taken from the Book of Job. And essentially, he wanted these two works to fit together. And here's how they fit together. 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. He didn't like the idea that you would have these competing debates about principles of government. He thought that they were unstable. 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. So Leviathan restores peace essentially through an absolute monarchy. Then comes Hobbes, and they're often seen as very similar, and they are to some extent. But the first thing to note about Hobbes as Locke is Locke is not a monarchist. 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. Locke is far more republican. 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. And those rights essentially are. We are all fundamentally free and equal. By equal, he doesn't mean we are egalitarianly equal. We're equal with respect to the fact that nobody has a legitimate authority to coerce us. And consequently, consent is the basis upon which you build government. Now, in his state of nature, unlike Hobbes, in Hobbes state of nature, it's a war of all against all.
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Yes.
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B
In Locke there is a natural law that undergirds civil society from which you can then effect essentially a right to revolution. 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. Now the other thing that Locke does that's different is his social contract places a far greater emphasis on separation of powers. It's not the separation of powers that the founders adopt. They adopt Montesquieu's qualified version of it, but the essential principles are there. The reason we have 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. So you want to decentralize its authority. Now Rousseau is a critic of both Hobbes and Locke and he's a bit complicated because he's a bit all over the place, philosophically speaking. I'll give you an example. In his Second Discourse and Rousseau's Second Discourse, he argues that you can't derive right from nature. Now that's problematic. So right away he's attacking one of the fundamental principles that are both in Hobbes and in Locke. And what does he mean by this? In many ways, he anticipates what we would call the fact value distinction. For Rousseau, he says nature is simply physical. Right is a moral postulate. And he argues that you can't derive a right from nature. So in including a right to property. Now the right to property in Locke is saint pros. In Rousseau it's problematic. 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. It's strictly conventional by nature. Nobody has a right to property. 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, it now changes over time. The major difference though between somebody like Rousseau and Hegel is Rousseau doesn't assume that the future is progressive. He thinks the future could turn out, in fact terrible. But once you insinuate the 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. So you're right to pinpoint those three characters as vital to our discussion.
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So let's talk about what those three viewed as far as human nature. 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? 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. What did those three, what did they believe as far as human nature? Do they believe people were naturally good or naturally inclined towards sin or not sin?
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So this time I'll go backwards. I'll start with Rousseau to Locke and to Hobbes. Rousseau argues in a very controversial way, especially in his book A Meal, that human beings are not born in any form of original sin whatsoever. By nature we are fully good. And by that he means we're not governed by vanity, which we pick up in society. Society. Once we enter civil society, we begin to compare, our vanity starts to come to the surface and then all sorts of nastiness begins to emerge. But Rousseau wants to draw a clear distinction though, between how nature made us and how civil society made us. And he faults Locke actually for causing this split. 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. For Rousseau, it doesn't need to be this way. 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 Rosuso.
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So before we get to Locke, I just want to emphasize this for our listeners, that college students not at Hillsdale, they really like Rosso. 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. Can you talk about that? How Rousseau is very attractive to an 18, 19 or 20 year old? It's very idealistic in some sense.
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Yeah, it's extremely idealistic and it's also very dangerous. If you read Lexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke and 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, appealing to these sort of wild abstractions. The appeal to Rousseau quite often, though, has to do with his perceived environmentalism and animal rights. And so Rousseau essentially creates romanticism. 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. 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. It creates this artificial world in which we're again judging each other not according to merit, but through commerce. And so there's a big appeal in Rousseau toward environmentalism. He also is the first to ennoble what he calls the homme sauvage, the natural savage. Not in a disparaging way, but he actually says a natural savage is far superior to civilized man. And you can see in many ways he influenced anthropology. So there's quite an appeal there. I'm not sure that Rousseau ultimately, though, is a hedonist, because in Emile and in Julie, he does elevate love. Now, you can question whether or not it's consistent with this fundamental thought, but he's actually quite a steer in his Politics in a Social Contract. There's hardly any kind of hedonism in his letter to d'. Alembert. D' Alembert was an Enlightenment philosopher, and he wanted to argue that Geneva needs a theater, that is, it needs a Hollywood. And Rousseau actually adopts the tone of a Roman censor and condemns public performance and theater as corrupting on morals. That's the side of Rousseau people don't generally read. From our perspective, it comes off as extremely conservative. 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. It's the fragmented aspect of Rousseau, where on the one hand he's talking about republicanism, and on the next hand he's celebrating a natural savage, where it gets kind of confusing.
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So I want to get to Locke, and I have a question about Tabula Rosa. I think I said that right. Raza. Tabula raza.
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Tabula rasa. Tabula raza.
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I'm pulling on blank slate. All my Hillsdale courses I've taken cause. Yeah, that's right.
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By the way, I heard you're taking them.
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That's right. I have completed five of them and they've really enriched my life. I could say that. So I wanna ask about Rosseau and his impact on the idea of not impact. What's the best way to say this? 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. Can you help explore that? 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.
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I don't recall that in any of his particular major works. It might be in his Confessions, that might be a reference there. But certainly in his works, the ones that people generally read, like Julie or Letter to d' Alembert or Emile, he has a certain ideal that he's driving towards. So in Emile he wants an independent citizen who is whole onto himself and is not a bourgeois. In Julie, he wants romantic love to be celebrated. In the Letter to d', Alembert, he wants the theater to be completely stamped out of civil society. 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. He does think that we simply evolved and in some cases devolved from orangutans. This is his famous note P in the Second Discourse, 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, that all is derived from our social context. 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. And I think that's where people often can see where Rousseau's sort of this very two different worlds, his Philist philosophy 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.
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So let's go to John Locke. Did John Locke believe that people were naturally good or naturally predisposed towards something other than that, or did he believe that people were a blank slate?
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A little bit of both. 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. And that law of nature he says is the law of reason. 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. For Locke, our rights are always inherently duty bound. So if you have a right to property, I have a duty to respect it. Now on the surface it looks like Locke thinks that human beings are generally good by nature. But before he even gets to chapter three where he talks about the state of the, the state of war, he does point out in a state of nature that the problem is not many people can reason well and sometimes that passions can get the better of us and as a result you can end up harming yourself and others. 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. And human beings can, through their own reason, actually intellect what it means to be a good human being. And he quotes Richard Hooker among others. It's a natural inclination to concern ourselves with ourselves, but also with our fellows. But he's not naive. I would say Locke is of the trust that verify school. 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. You don't want people to, to abuse whatever power they have in government. Sorry.
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No, no, no, please.
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So with Hobbes, the picture looks very different. It looks as if man is essentially left on his own devices in the state of nature in Hobbes depiction. Now that's not to say that he doesn't believe that there's a fundamental nature that can still guide us. He does. He still believes, for example, in natural right. If he advocated a completely void world in the natural world, he couldn't have a teaching about natural right. In Hobbes the picture looks far darker. 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. And with Hobbes you would be hard pressed to say that man by nature is naturally good. I think what happens is man is a natural condition of scarcity 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. So I would say he would be, of the three, probably the starkest with respect to your question.
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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? Naturally, you know, are we more inclined to have original sin? Or do you think we're corrupted by the circumstances around you? At the top level schools, Ivy League schools, they almost all say, oh, no, we're basically naturally good. 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. But it's all the systems around us that corrupt us. And the significance for my line of work of that question and is then they have to explain away all the suffering and the poverty and the tragedy. And they do so by saying, well, it's all society's fault. 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.
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Rousseau is the source of that. If you take a look.
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Elaborate on that.
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Rousseau is the source, if you look. Actually, I wish I knew we were going in this direction. 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. He wants to essentially shift the blame, all of our vices and all of our neuroses on civil society, and specifically, as I said, Locke. And for him, Locke symbolizes capitalism. 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. This is why it leads to revolutionary ire. If you fundamentally accept that belief and you want to restore human beings to a natural goodness, you have one of two options for societies. Go in the woods. You can be a solitary walker, or you just simply rejig society and cause a revolution. And that's why his thought is still with us today. He's extremely important and very influential, all
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A
three of these thinkers, and very seductive for someone that might not be.
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He's a beautiful writer. Yes, he's an absolutely beautiful writer. And he knows how to appeal to conflicts that almost anybody living anywhere can appeal to. And so he's very good. He knew his ancients and his early modern thinkers. He's an incredible reasoner, and he's just seductive and he's extremely powerful.
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So we look at Rousseau, and you Mentioned this. I want to connect all this for our listeners. Is Rousseau heavily influenced what we would now know as the communists, the socialists, the German historicists? Can you draw that line? Because a lot of people say, charlie, how does somebody think socialism can work? I say, we really gotta go back a little bit and understand their view of human nature and Jean Jacques Rousseau and how there's this idea that it's the external, not the internal soul that is the chief thing to blame. Can you kind of do a little bit of a kind of line of succession? Rousseau influenced who? Who influenced who?
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Absolutely. Believe it or not, Rousseau influenced all of those, even though they are in competition with each other. Nationalism grows out of Rousseau.
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Really?
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Absolutely. The Social Contract is a very nationalistic organization. Communism has its roots in Rousseau. Rousseau's Critiques of commerce inspired Mar. And everybody knows that Rousseau's view of how man develops or sometimes even regresses in history inspired Hegel. All three cite him. You would be hard pressed not to see people like, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, who were very influential in the Nazis, and he cites Rousseau. So what's amazing about Rousseau and Leo Strauss once described him as the equivalent of a volcanic eruption. And what he meant by that is if you consider lava to be fragments of his influence, it went everywhere. Depending on which fragment you caught, you ran away with some aspect of Rousseau. Now, why do I say that modern nationalism was influenced by Rousseau? Because the National Socialists were in reaction to capitalism and communism, and Rousseau helps to lay the foundation for that. Now it gets filtered through other thinkers and of course, through their own ideology. But oddly enough, everybody took what they wanted out of Rousseau. Marx takes materialism out of Rousseau in the Critique of John Locke and then turns it in the direction of communism. 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. What they all have in common is a revolutionary spirit because there's a promise that in the future things will get better. They disagree on what that good is. But you're not going to find that optimism in Plato. In the Republic, there's a declension of regimes. In other words, Plato starts with a perfect regime and then shows you a thousand ways it can go wrong. By the end of the Republic, you're purified of political idealism. In Aristotle, Aristotle has the ideal regime and then the practical regime. By the time you're finished with the book, you realize that politics and Idealism should never mix. 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. That makes a very dangerous combination for our times.
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A
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.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
And his biography is really interesting. He'd just take like a minute and just. He lived a really weird life. I just think it's interesting for people to know.
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Yeah, he had many children. He orphaned them. He's famous for that. And of course then writes a book on how you ought to raise a child.
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Yeah, I know, it's just. But he was a kind of an adulterer. He's a flander, I should say. He was all over the place.
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No, that is true. He had some very famous escapades with very wealthy women. He had a falling out with David Hume. It's not exactly clear over what Hume thought. He was a bit temperamental, but, you know, 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. I would consider him a distorted genius, but, you know, he's quite a reasoner. You know, there are some valid criticisms that he puts forward, but in the end, I think his philosophy is just fundamentally incoherent.
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A
So let's go to Locke. So Locke was a major inspiration for the Founding Fathers. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wanted to have life, liberty and property, which I think would have been a copy paste right out of Locke. Talk about how Locke really inspired the philosophical foundation of. For many of our founding fathers of this great country.
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B
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. I believe the Bible was number one and Locke was like number two or three. So it's pretty evident that Locke's influence is all over the Founding. The founders adopted his understanding of natural right, which for Locke again means that we are born free and equal by nature and nature's God. And that the purpose, and here's the real emphasis, the purpose of government is not to give us these rights. That's not where they come from. Once you understand that nature has provided us rights, then the purpose of government is to protect those. And so the primacy of the individual and the community of which we're a part of plays a massive role in lot. And then it helps define what the proper end of government ought to be, and that is to protect those rights. The other thing they took from him is also the separation of powers. 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. And so I would say Locke's natural right teaching is essential and it's really the core. In many ways it was. As my friend and colleague in our department, Tom west, recently wrote a book on the political theory of the American founding. And he said, look, they disagreed on many things, but there was an obvious consensus among them, 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.
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A
Every one of these thinkers was right about something. I think more were right about more than others, obviously. 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. And we have to have you back on, because this is.
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B
I was going to say, man, you got to have me back for Machiavelli. He's great.
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A
Well, he can be great. I think if you apply it correctly, it could be misapplied. So I want to ask about Hobbs, though. In this world of safetyism that we live in, where it seems that everyone is walking around fearing violent death all the time, you know, wearing two masks, you know, just mandating vaccines, whatever it might be. Was Hobbes right about that? And I'm not asking you to, you know, overly apply that, but talk about how Hobbes might have been onto something where, you know, hey, almost everyone over their head, you know, you're going to die. It's kind of this ever present sort of Damocles, you know. What do you think about that?
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B
Well, see, this is why I prefer Locke to Hobbes, and I like them both. The example that you're providing is essentially this is what Hobbes would say. You see, Charlie, you just proved my point. When given a choice between security and liberty, what are people all around us choosing? Security. Safety is so you've just made my point, Hobbs. Yes. Now, Locke would say, though rights are even more fundamental. 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. There's still fear, there's still politics. There's still the necessity for war. He describes conditions among nations as a state of war. He doesn't assume that you'll ever have this kind of global peace. So there is a hard teaching at Hobbes. I would say what you're really seeing is the effects of Montesquieu. Montesquieu is the thinker who argued that human nature is fundamentally timid. Hobbes did not think human nature was fundamentally timid. He thought that the problem with human nature is that it's not timid. 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. So I would say there's still a harder edge in Hobbes and Locke that's virtually absent in Montesquieu. His state of nature, for example, Hobbes, we're fighting and killing and slaughtering each other. In Montesquieu, he presents a picture equivalent of something like Disney's Bambi. We're just these timid creatures. We break a twig under our foot and we flee. And his argument there is that by nature we're really timid. And so what we want is a tranquil society. With Hobbes, there's an emphasis on fear. That's not tranquility.
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A
So now I want to close this, and this will be a nice teaser to the next conversation we have. I just want to remind people, go to charlieforhillsdale.com 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. You can all of a sudden realize who their inspirations were, whether they realize it or not. And you understand that there's been thousands of years of thinking and pondering over these ideas and you could derive wisdom for it. And Hillsdale College is the only place that has done this in a way that I've seen. It's super amazing. Charlieforhillsdale.com Charlieforhillsdale.com 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. Machiavelli wrote, I think, right near 1519 or something. 1520 ish.
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B
Right.
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A
And some people would say that he kind of started the Enlightenment. I don't know if you agree with that or not. I heard, I think it was Michael Anton say that recently. Tell us about a little bit biographical. And then just in the couple minutes we have remaining why we should care about Machiavelli, then we can get into all the good and the bad of it.
- [34:06]
B
Okay, well, Machiavelli was also immensely influential, not just simply on the founding, but just in shaping the contours of the Enlightenment. When I say I love him, I love him the way I love all great thinkers. There's so much to really think about. I'm also working on a book in which he plays a big role. So that's why I. I lit up. Machiavelli was an actually practicing political statesman, and it was only when he was in exile that he turned to writing the Prince and the Art of War and the Discourses. He essentially wrote for a number of reasons. 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. 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. And so during the Renaissance, there was an attempt to synthesize Christianity with classical virtue, and Machiavelli calls them out on that. They're just two incompatible worldviews. You're gonna have to pick one, but you can't try to synthesize both. 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, and that is to make philosophy practical, make it ideological. In Plato and Aristotle, there's too much prudence baked into their theory. Whereas with Machiavelli, his emphasis on founding is designed to give us a sense of the character of philosophy. It's not necessarily theoretical and good in itself or any of these abstractions that you often hear among the ancients. For Machiavelli, the purpose of politics is to satisfy man's natural desire for acquisition and conquest, and that shapes the rest of Western civilization. Once he enters that, then you can start seeing the thinkers we just discussed, in many ways reacting to him. So it just never ends. It's a long conversation.
- [36:13]
A
He said, why are we talking about all these imaginary republics? We know what we want. Let's go get it. Why are we talking about the city in the clouds? I mean, come on, we know what we want.
- [36:23]
B
And if you think about the ancients, I mean, their entire world was based on a certain kind of looking at a political idealism or looking at the perfect regime. Machiavelli is not interested in that. He wants to take us away from the perfect regime to the imperfect and how it can perhaps be improved upon. 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. So he's pretty remarkable.
- [36:54]
A
And talk a little bit about the circumstances. He wrote in warring Italian city states.
- [37:00]
B
Kind of bedlam, he tells us in the Discourses. And if you also read Marsilius of Padua, who wrote before him, Italy was a complete dysfunctional state. It was disunited. 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. You can see this in Shakespeare's play King John. 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 a treaty or not. Well, that's the world in which Machiavelli is born and operating in. And he thinks that until the question of the Church is settled before you can. Before you can move forward and commence with the unification of Italy, you have to reconceive the role of religion in modernity. 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. It's pretty remarkable.
- [38:01]
A
It's amazing. So just to recap, we went through social contract theory. We talked about a little bit, just very introductory of Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau, and then we just did a little bit of Machiavelli. And so let's tease people going into this next conversation, that you and I will have the significance and the implication that Machiavelli has had on modern politics is what,
- [38:25]
B
Incalculable. I can't even measure it. There's not a thinker after him worth reading who isn't aware of him. And I'll leave you with this. Montesquieu, like Locke, was one of the most influential writers in the American founding. The only person he ever says we need to combat his influence is Machiavelli. And that's one of the most towering geniuses of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu writes in the spirit of the laws. We have yet to cure ourselves of Machiavellianism. So when a genius like Montesquieu points to Machiavelli as the most influential of the time, that's when I listen. So he's pretty credible. And according to Montesquieu, he is the thinker of their time and ours in many ways.
- [39:08]
A
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. 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. Doctor, I've enjoyed this conversation. Anything you want to plug a book, any way that people can support you?
- [39:36]
B
No, I just want to thank you for your support of the college. It means the world to us, and it's a delight to even hear that you're so engaged in the courses that you're working your way through it. The only thing I think that's missing, Charlie, is a master's degree, at least a PhD from Hillsdale College, so you might want to consider that.
- [39:52]
A
Okay, Will, I'll skip over the undergrad and then we'll go over there. But all kidding aside, charlieforhillsdale.com, 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. It's deep stuff, but it's digestible and it's just terrific. So thank you, doctor, so much. We'll talk to you soon.
- [40:20]
B
Great to see you. Take care. Thanks.
- [40:23]
A
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts@freedom charliekirk.com and get involved with TurningPoint USA@tpusa.com God bless you guys. Speak to you soon.
- [40:36]
B
For more on many of these stories and news you can Trust, go to charliekirk.com.