Renaissance: Hobbes, Machiaveli & Locke - Part 1

***This blog post is the first part, in line with my seminar next week, and perhaps more out of a desire to finish my reading more than anything else, part two of this post will be issued by Sunday...***

When perhaps trying to conjure images of the Renaissance in Europe, I would suppose I think of scholarship, medical advancements that led the way to cure diseases nobody speaks of nowadays and, as mentioned, the humanist and still-life art that changed the way in which people think of iconic, stained glass imagery. In many cases that is still the case. Machiavelli with his belief that "man is the measure of all things" (borrowed from another possible ancient atheist, Protagoras) and Princes being able to kill, corrupt and manipulate their way into power. Hobbes, on the other hand, believing  that even despotism would be a better alternative to a revolution and thus "anarchy" and Locke saying that it WAS okay to rebel if you did have a despot at your hands...Who to believe? Perhaps, to conclude at an early stage of these posts, neither of these men are really stable alternatives in a modern reality where the world is troubled as it is without these antiquated philosophers influencing the absolutely corrupt. Hobbes was a Monarchist during the Civil War (1641-51) and goodness knows if crazed, "Royal Martyr" figures such as Charles I were recast into the leaders of countries such as North Korea and Venezuela. Martyrs! More like pariahs!

Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." Indeed, this is very much the case in the facts around Hobbes and Machiavelli. When reading Russell, it is utterly dispiriting to read analogies such as that of Machiavelli apporving Hitler's means of getting into power because of the Reichstag fire and purging his own party. Indeed, what can be more satisfying than a "Prince" exterminating over 10 million of your own and other couuntries populations in the most savage, brutal ways possible? Well done to Machiavelli! With aproval of the humanist, immoral popes such as that of Alexander VI, until the invasion of Charles V in 1527, the Itallian Renaissance only apperared to be partially free from the Catholic church's control and could not scientifically create any secular control until the 17th/18th centuries. Both Machiavelli and Hobbes did share a belief in the fact a monarchy ruling a particular state would be more effective than any other ways of leadership. Whilst Machiavelli had comprimise in The Prince, Hobbes gave a Plato-style "lump it" attitude that once a figure or parliamentarian assembly were chosen, people became second class citizens. The alternative being, like in Machiavelli's otehr volume Discourses, the powers would be reciprocally in "check" and people knew their place. Thus making revolution near enough impossible because of perfect balance...! 

This fact being quite flawed in many ways is one I will return to tomorrow. However, I would think of cases such as that of the civil war in China and their Communist Revolution in 1949, as equal with that is the breakdown of the USSR in 1991 when Gorbachev, the only Western loved and most modertae of communist leaders, was forced to disassemble his own country's fouundations for the state we know as Russia today. For now though, I will return on Sunday with more on Locke, Hobbes criticism and further case studies.