Tuesday March 01, 2005

Hobbesian or Hobson’s: Andersen Responds

While at first I assumed this was just a sophisticated spam trap designed to snare old Spy fanatics like myself, Kurt Andersen sent in the following email last week in response to my post about his use of the phrase “Hobbesian choice.” It appears in its entirety.

I noticed that you (like some other bloggers) took me to task for using “Hobbesian choice” in my piece in New York magazine last week. In fact, I’m a little clueless, but not in the way you think. I thought I was being literate and amusing by twisting Hobson’s Choice into an apt new phrase: that is, I meant to refer to Hobbes’ essential nasty-brutish social philsophy, i.e. in Leviathan, as I recall, he says that the basic human social choice is between living in a State of Nature (such as civil war in Iraq) or under a potentially tyrannical state, the Leviathan (such as U.S. occupation of Iraq). Furthermore, I think Hobbes also said there are only two choices in any given situation — action or omission — and I was arguing in the column that Bush-haters were refusing to admit that painful binary choice as regards Iraq. So, anyhow, I thought I was being smart, but I guess I was just being confusing and opaque. And thanks to you, I now know I wasn’t even original in my conflation, just deliberate — I hadn’t known that Hobson’s Choice and Hobbesian Choice are routinely confused.

Cheers,

Kurt Andersen

Posted by jim at 05:57 AM ||