Political Science 1020E Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Natural And Legal Rights, Rational Choice Theory, Systematic Chaos
Document Summary
According to the preferred definition of politics from the last lecture, politics: necessarily involves violence, requires strong leaders, is a way of dealing with conflict, is best left to the experts, is better than sex. Hobbes--- two keys to understanding of human nature: self-knowledge, the nature of thoughts, hopes, and fears, knowledge of the general principles of physics. When a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat els stay it": materialist, mechanist view of human beings. Felicity: search to secure felicity will bring us to war in state of nature, our fear of death would lead humans to create a state, without state, felicity would lead to war of all against all. We are all equal in that all human possess roughly the same level of strength and skill, and so any human has the capacity to kill one another.