----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Sam Bostaph said: <<I think it's worth bearing in mind in any comparison of Hobbes and Hume that Hume had more than practical reasons for not emphasizing a debt to Hobbes. They were opponents on the key political-philosophical point of natural rights. For Hobbes, government was a way of "granting" rights and protecting naturally brutish humans from each other. For Hume, rights predate government and government's job is to guarantee and protect them; and, human nature is not so brutish, as humans are God's creatures with a moral nature. Buchanan et al. have a Hobbsian view of human nature. Jim Buchanan is quite forthcoming in that regard.>> I am not sure I agree with Sam Bostaph's interpretation. Hobbes believed in natural rights---men and women have a natural right to do what is necessary to save their lives. They trade off "absolute liberty" for something less because absolute liberty is hell (for a modern version see Buchanan's Logic of Leviathan). I tried to make this clear in my earlier post. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that Hobbes and Hume are much closer as "social scientists" than historians are willing to admit. The ethical theorists who are miles away from Hobbes and Hume are Shaftesbury and the moral sense school. Indeed, any economist in sympathy with some of the modern Austrian school should admire Hobbes as much as Hume because Hobbes used (1) methodological individualism as his principal method of analysis (following Gallieo, etc.) and (2) pioneered the distinction between natural and artificial which Hume and later Hayek make so much of and (3) was an early subjectivist in his claim what what someone is "worth" is what someone is able and willing to pay for his services (this last influence shows up later in both Mandeville and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations ---chapter 5 I believe). To declare that Hobbes did not believe in natural law or natural rights is simply not correct. I am away from my home library but I think my source on this matter is Warrender. Laurence S. Moss ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]