Who's the best political philosopher of all time, and why is it Thomas Hobbes?

Who's the best political philosopher of all time, and why is it Thomas Hobbes?

I don't know if I would call him the best but he is pretty GOAT tier.

For me The leviathan feels a tad defeatist, but i can understand why his theories are popular.

OP why Hobbes?

Proven wrong by political science

perhaps you would like to stand in front of the class room and explain

Not quite. Pic related would be the one.

Oh damn, I missed the "political". Well, I guess you could be considered to be correct then.

Move out of the way white boy

Because constitutional monarchy is best government

OP misspelled something.

Hobbes is pretty great in a lot of ways but he, Rousseau, and Locke all made the same fundamental and critical error in assuming that there was a time when humans were atomized and individualistic. Such a time has never existed; society predates the individual, always and everywhere.

>society predates the individual
Depends on your definition of society but it is definitely at least the same age, if you assume only humans can form a society
Also Machiavelli is the answer from a purely political perspective

By that I mean that society predates any ability humans have to come together as individuals and form a social contract. Social contracts don't really exist because the actual structures of social groups exist before the capacity of humans to contemplate them.

Every philosopher born after Aquinas is weak.

And this one is worse than shit.

>dude the whore of babylon is the one true church lmao

I don't believe in God but Aquinas is definitely one of the greatest philosophers to have ever lived. Not sure I'd go as far as to say that no one after him is any good at all, though.

This has nothing to do with religion.

Then why bring up a theologian as the final decent philosopher, even though he scorned the title?

>Aquinas

That's a funny way of spelling "the medieval spastic who plagiarised Aristotle".

Because post-Medieval Philosophy is a mistake.

This may be the most intellectually amateur thing I've ever seen written on Veeky Forums. It's incredibly out of touch, but too subtle to be bait. So let me explain to you why you're wrong.

Prior to Aquinas the foundations of Catholic philosophy were primarily drawn from Plato. The church was somewhat skeptical of Aristotle, and saw him as a more of a pagan. What Aquinas did is completely reverse that--he drew from Aristotelianism and explored it in such a way that the entire church, almost overnight, began to base its philosophical worldview on the teachings and logic of Aristotle. That's an enormous, and enormously influential, change. It's very difficult to understate how different Catholicism would be today if it hadn't happened.

It might seem minor because it's so distant, being almost a thousand years ago, but what Aquinas did here is in fact the most colossal intellectual achievement in the past millennium and has yet to be equaled.