"It's Horror All the Way Down"

"As for Miller's vision, it's horror all the way down. He's not looking to solve for this state of nature. He simply calls it 'the real world,' one whose anarchic rules America just needs to accept and use to its benefit. If Miller has read Hobbes, he's drawing the wrong lesson. Even if he might like the idea of Trump as the Leviathanlike authoritarian come to bring order to the chaos (and Miller's recent, and disputed, invocation of a president’s absolute 'plenary authority' would suggest that that’s the case), this is not how Trump understands his role; otherwise, he would be bolstering international institutions and multilateral relationships rather than trashing whatever and whoever does not serve his glory."

Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic writes about "the dog-eat-dog worldview of this administration."

And Rex Huppke at USA Today asks, "We're really doing another year of this?"

"A Mission to Show That the Great Dead Philosophers Have Been Misunderstood"

"Gottlieb has got Hume's geniality down to a T. 'Every philosopher likes to think he has reached his conclusions via rigorous reasoning,' he says, with a collusive wink to his readers; in the 17th century, indeed, 'falling in love with geometry seems almost to have been an occupational hazard'. Take Descartes: he was notable for 'his faith in his own unusually bright light of reason', but 'perhaps he did not have all the answers'. As for Hobbes, he was so 'bedazzled' by a priori geometry that he 'got rather carried away' and ended up 'over-egging his pudding'. But Leibniz is the one you really have to watch, since, poor fellow, he 'did, in effect, tend to confuse his own mind with that of God'."

Jonathan Rée in The Guardian reviews Gottliebb's The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.

"Modern Ways of Thinking about Politics Can without Undue Exaggeration Be Said to Begin with Hobbes"

"As for how Ryan squares this with the more 'liberal' thinkers who came after Hobbes, again the answer is context. Without Hobbes, there would have been no need for John Locke to react to him, and without Locke, no Paine or Jefferson, no Hegel or Marx."

In the Los Angeles Times, David L. Ulin reviews Alan Ryan's On Politics.

"Britain’s First Modern Philosopher"

"Hobbes lived through England’s civil wars, and several wars of religion on the continent. Did these terrifying times prompt him to offer a cure that was worse than the disease? That is the gist of some virtuoso invective by Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British historian who died in 2003. Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, summed up 'Leviathan' curtly: 'The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism.'"

The Economist reconsiders Thomas Hobbes.