Thomas Hobbes in Cairo

Hobbes in Cairo

While listening to NPR this morning, listening to an Egyptian man plead for the Army to intervene and restore order between Mubarak’s supporters and the revolutionaries, I was struck by the seeming inevitability of this plea for Leviathan to protect the public from itself. Presumably, it was because Mubarak did not serve, or no longer served, this role that the public rebelled against his rule. It is not a rebellion against rule as such. To the contrary, it is a rebellion on behalf of law and therefore, to pull in another classical resource, it takes on the appearance and form of Edmund Burke’s defense of the British, by contrast to the French, Revolution. This is not to say that history is condemned to forever repeat itself, much less that Egyptians are condemned to repeat the history of its former imperialist oppressor. It is, however, to say that freedom—understood as the absence of constraint—is on no one’s radar and that determinate freedom (GFW Hegel, T Hobbes) is much nearer to the plea that I am hearing on the streets of Cairo.

Comments are closed.