A king is a focal point. It is not the king, but the shared idea of a king that creates a State (=fixed status between ppl). There is no "anarchy", but an anarchic perspective on a specific State, on who actually constitutes a State: it is the bottom, the many parts and not the top. A statist view sees it the other way around. Hobbes is in between.
I mean, Hobbes' description is a pretty accurate description of a hunter-gatherer society (except possibly "no account of Time"), and sedentary agriculture and governments are tightly linked. (This, of course, isn't a guarantee that at a new level of tech and understanding, one couldn't _now_ step aside from those conditions.)
Not absolute governments. Saga period Iceland was sedentary, had nothing close to a king, and produced great literature. Medieval Europe in general had very few rulers who came close to what Hobbes was proposing — absolute monarchy was a post-medieval innovation.
But Icelandic community was secondary, it wasn't a hunter-gatherer society that developed on its own, it was a group of former Norwegian subjects which managed to throw the yoke off. So not a counterexample to the narrow (possibly-narrower-than-Hobbes-intended) claim that the original state of humans sucked and provided no industry or culture or whatever.
As for absoluteness, this is a within-elite notion: for many purposes, oligarchies and monarchies have similar effect on the outside.
These are beautiful and powerful poems.
A king is a focal point. It is not the king, but the shared idea of a king that creates a State (=fixed status between ppl). There is no "anarchy", but an anarchic perspective on a specific State, on who actually constitutes a State: it is the bottom, the many parts and not the top. A statist view sees it the other way around. Hobbes is in between.
https://pointcloud.substack.com/p/can-we-overcome-the-state
I mean, Hobbes' description is a pretty accurate description of a hunter-gatherer society (except possibly "no account of Time"), and sedentary agriculture and governments are tightly linked. (This, of course, isn't a guarantee that at a new level of tech and understanding, one couldn't _now_ step aside from those conditions.)
Not absolute governments. Saga period Iceland was sedentary, had nothing close to a king, and produced great literature. Medieval Europe in general had very few rulers who came close to what Hobbes was proposing — absolute monarchy was a post-medieval innovation.
But Icelandic community was secondary, it wasn't a hunter-gatherer society that developed on its own, it was a group of former Norwegian subjects which managed to throw the yoke off. So not a counterexample to the narrow (possibly-narrower-than-Hobbes-intended) claim that the original state of humans sucked and provided no industry or culture or whatever.
As for absoluteness, this is a within-elite notion: for many purposes, oligarchies and monarchies have similar effect on the outside.