Who was in the wrong here?

Rousseau only presents an enrichment for the world in the form of a negative example. Hobbes has actually insightful thoughts.

Rousseau was an utopian retard

Rousseau was an idiot, a manchild and a fascist.
>But muh good savage
The subjective perception of evil is intrinsic to human nature. Stating that in some remote past noone did something bad just for no reason is stupid. Hobbes was so incredibly right.
Also, Rousseau was a bad person. Look what he did to Voltaire

>and a fascist.
Wut

Even if he was all keen on absolute democracy he would have stabbed to death anyone who would speak against Geneva

Hobbes. Rousseau was at least right about democracy.

I agree, I wanna get spanked too. And babied.

>Hobbes is right, look! someone else said he was right

Prove to me that stateless societies are red-in-tooth-and-claw deathmatches where all seeks to slaughter everyone else.

>fascist

Er, yeah, nice try.

Somalia exists yaknow

>Carl Schmitt
Interesting choice of name for that.

Literally every instance of anarchy in Human History.

This is bad even by the current standards of lit.

One example doesn't make a rule. And, besides, just how familiar are you with Somalia? Could you be certain that, just with every act of wanton violence, there aren't acts of altruism or cooperation somewhere else (in fact, I'm pretty sure those murderous gangs exhibit cooperation, which goes to complicating the issue)?

Because, if you could, you'll be just one step on the very long and winding path to validating Hobbes.

Hobbes is essentially right. All man seek to do what they believe is good in the world. But in their zealotry they deem men who think differently of such things as 'the good' or 'justice' as heretics or vermin who are inherently evil and must be dealt with.

The sites of the pre-Columbian societies of California are renowned archaeological circles for exhibiting virtually no indicators of violence.

They were stateless, and they didn't live like murderous animals.

(I wonder, just how familiar are you with Hobbes and stateless societies?)

A Tribe of 45000 people lead by a war-chief who had a hierarchical structure underneath him to enforce his rulings is a State, you dingdong.

>There is evidence that the Central Plains/Initial Coalescent villagers built well-planned defensive works for its village. They were replacing an earlier dry moat fortification by a new fortification ditch around the expanded village when an attack occurred that resulted in the massacre. The attacking group killed all the villagers. Archaeologists from the University of South Dakota, directed by project director Larry J. Zimmerman, field director Thomas Emerson, and osteologist P. Willey found the remains of at least 486 people killed during the attack.

>Most of these remains showed signs of ritual mutilation, particularly scalping. Other examples were tongues being removed, teeth broken, beheading, hands and feet being cut off, and other forms of dismemberment.

Scalping, nice. Pretty good body count as well, definitely not "ritualistic" combat. I guess not all Indians were peaceful hippies. This massacre took place in the 1300s, so don't bleat about the malignant influence of Europeans.

>A Tribe of 45000 people

Okay, now you've shown you don't know what the fuck you're on about.

>people have a 'natural' claim to 'their land'

spooked as fuck

That's funny. That's neither California (in fact it's like responding to a point about Britain by talking about Azerbaijan) and nor did I "bleat about the malignant influence of Europeans"?

I have to ask myself, why did you even bother ?

Hobbs's account of the formation of the state is fallacious. He says that in order to be able to resolve conflicts and enter into contracts man must enter into a contract, so to speak, to create the state. But according to Hobbes's logic a state must have existed prior to itself in order for people to have the trust to agree with eachother to create the state. Thus we have an infinite regress

>>people have a 'natural' claim to 'their land'

We are still on Veeky Forums, aren't we? And yet I find two people who, upon reading "Pre-Columbian" instantly start digging out arguments about how savage Plains Indians were and how Native Americans have no claim to North America.

What the fuck has that got to do with my point? Learn. To. Read.

I'm just saying, if you want to cherrypick examples of peaceful tribes, two can play at that game. The fact is that peace is as rare among primitives as it is between states. Whenever one tries to point this out, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork and blames Europeans for somehow causing the violence.

I sometimes wonder why I bother arguing with people who've already decided to believe in the noble savage myth for emotional reasons. It's like arguing with a woman.

>486 men women and children murdered and scalped

How would you describe this as anything other than savage?

Nothing, I have a hangover.

However, it's all fine and dandy that the Indians might've been a (more) peaceful people (which I highly doubt considering they are people and people are universally violent and generally speaking horrible or at least capable and, when push comes to shove, able and willing to such acts). But so what?

A stateless society isn't necessarily one where we have to rely on the altruism of others in order to maintain order.
Granted there will always be "savages" who don't respect social norms such as respect for private property rights.
As such there will be a market place for protection in the form of insurance companies. Get rid of the state monopoly and prices will go down while the quality will go up.
Just saying that it's not inconceivable that a stateless society can be well organised. Google Lichtenstein

blushu

>misses the point
>brings up irrelevant nonsense
>says "this is what people like you usually do"
>strawmaning like crazy

No, this is like arguing with a woman.

I did not claim to support the noble savage thesis. Again, if you read what I wrote, I called both Rousseau and Hobbes wrong.

Again, learn to read.

>hangover

No surprise there. My point, again, (third "again") is that all stateless societies aren't red-in-tooth-and-claw deathmatches, because we find evidence of the contrary (not to mention the old favourites of 1930s Catalonia and the Paris Commune) - I gave just one example.

I can make this even simpler: if cooperation never existed in pre-state societies, how exactly did the state emerge?

I misread my source at first. The population of the Iroquois confederacy was 12000 people and my point still stands. And many regional cultures had even larger populations than that. The Aztecs had over 200000.

In other words:
>i hectically googled a reposte to your point without any prior knowledge of the subject whatsoever and, in doing so, got a major, major substantative point wrong (making my entire response a waste of everyone's time)

And why am I engaging with you again?

Depends, when the number exceeds 150 (the Dunbar number) it becomes more difficult for society to maintain social contacts and thereby foster social trust. Moreover, societies are vulnerable to be hijacked by what North would term 'specialists in violence'. Finally, when different tribes meet the vulnerability that lies in such a meeting entails, in its worse sense, the overthrow of destruction of one group vis-a-vis another group which creates paranoia and the desire to strike the first blow just to make sure you're not the sucker who gets punched out first, following the logic that tribes possess material qualities that can be vital/important for tribes to thrive and prosper.

I think pre-state societies can be peaceful, but that doesn't mean that there is no state of nature; that there is no threat from other tribes whether apparent or not

It's clearly quite simple. Hobbes with his social contract was a run-of-the-mill liberal while Rousseau was the first proponent of truly identitarian democracy, i.e. that rulers and the ruled should be considered to be identical.

>>Most of these remains showed signs of ritual mutilation, particularly scalping. Other examples were tongues being removed, teeth broken, beheading, hands and feet being cut off, and other forms of dismemberment.
The women traditionally did the post mortem desecration.

In other words I didn't have the population of the Iroquois confederacy on the tip of my tongue.
Now, please tell me how they (As you claimed) weren't a state. Because you are full of shit.

Maybe we need to define first what a state is? The westphalian definition certainly wouldn't apply to the Iroquois or the Aztecs.

Are you sure you want to do this?

Okay then, here we go: how does the organisational structure of the Iroquois Confederacy (based in what is now upper New York, for those (you?) who don't know) negate a point about the largely peaceful history of hunter-gatherers in California?

This is much like claiming the Gaul power structure is a perfect place to start if you want to talk about the nature of the Mongols.

No, don't. You're giving this moron too much credit. Don't allow yourself to be sucked into his silly tangent.

What's the next Schmitt book that I should buy? What's your masterpiece? I already read Nomos...blew my mind.

Not him but can you source your estimation of Californian indigenous social organization?

Yet bear in mind that the absence of a state is not equivalent to an absence of -archy. Feudal European Kingdoms were not states in the Westphalian sense any more than a chieftain and his subjects are.

If hunter-gatherer societies aren't "stateless", we shouldn't be talking about Hobbes.

The best books by Carl Schmitt are The Concept of the Political and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy because they lay the foundations of his philosophy.

Did Hobbes argue for the state, even? I haven't read his works yet, only curosory commentary. Did he not argue for a sovereign/authority, not necessarily in the form of a state?
The association of natives under a chieftain would be consonant with this thesis.

Check these quads I got, your argument is invalid

Yeah, fair enough. "Ex Captivitate Salus" is coming out in october. Should be interesting.

I'd really love to read the correspondences between Schmitt and Junger but I can't read German.

I'm thinking about doing a doctoral thesis on him but I haven't figured out what to do with him yet that would be original. But I really want to.

Since I am German I feel like I should become a translator of his works. There's a dedicated crowd of Schmittians out there, both on the left and on the right.

Ah, I see your point. From what I understand, most of the tribes couldn't be described as fitting the Hobbesian "idealised" model. They weren't autocratic.

Autocracy does not mean totalitarianism. An autocrat would reserve the right to enjoin his fiat without check, but that licence to or not to means an autocrat can be a passive agent just as well.

Hobbes posits the sovereign as a compromise agreed upon as a measure against the vulnerability man is exposed to in the state of nature.

>vulnerability man is exposed to

Excuse my French, I'm not used to arguing nor proofreading my posts

Hey, I studied said tribes back in college.
I don't think your contention is fair for two reasons: firstly, the California area was particularly plentiful in natural resources, which meant the inhabitants of the area never really had to compete in an scarce, unforgiving environment nor did they need to engage in nomadic behavior in search for resources; this is a very unusual setting and kind of an exception to a rule. Second, I don't think it's exactly fair to call them stateless people: there was cooperation and regional planning in several regards, from trade to organizational matter regarding territory and control of fires and such; they even seemed to had a statewide common currency (i think it was marine seashells?) and their society was definitely extremely stratified and specialized.

They were both right in their own way. This idea that they are in total opposition in their ideas, is wrong.

It is true to say that social institutions, corrupts people and makes them worse moral agents, but it's also true to say that a society that loses a functioning and strong state will end up in economic and social turmoil.

Modern examples like Iraq after Saddam or Libya after Gaddafi clearly gives credence to Hobbes' conclusions, but so does a story of a child raised in foster homes who turns into a violent rapist.

get off Veeky Forums, Russell

It's true, mate. He is not necessarily talking about forming a state in the modern sense, but the social and political effects of the dispersal or concentration of power. If power is concentrated then you have order, if it is dispersed you have anarchy. He is writing in the context of the English Civil War.

The only thing I ever found interesting about Rousseau is his Roman insistence on the Civic Religion and, of course, his dandyish elegance. I think The Confessions is Rosseau at his finest, he was too queer for statecraft.