Poached, fried, or Socratic?
Take commuting. You're on a train, in a car, or on a bike, and periodically you're held up by a red light. It might be frustrating, but a red light is a literal manifestation of the law of fairness, that everybody should be allowed to have a turn. And although it is very literal, it's also abstract, for it has a depersonalised authority that we all pretty much obey. In this it enacts what Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century political theorist, said about how to make societies run smoothly. You've got to have an abstract authority for people to look up to and obey, or else they would all turn on each other. He thought that abstract authority had to be embodied in a sovereign, but in fact it's been transposed into something as humdrum as the red light, which regulates people's behaviour and so stops what Hobbes called the 'war of all against all'.
No comments:
Post a Comment