KRUGMAN'S ENLIGHTENMENT DEMOCRACY STATE OF NATURE MAINSTREAM AMERICA NOT THE RIGHT FRINGE

Re Krugman's Nasty, Brutish and Trump

 

Let's just quote Hobbes' whole state of nature phrase: solitary poor nasty brutish and short.

 

The Enlightenment state of nature, Krugman's, that of Locke, Diderot, and Rousseau, and of course Adam Smith, etc, was really a state of benign Godless anarchy, where isolated individuals, basically good but stupid by nature dwelt mostly in peace, plenty, and accidental harmony, pursuing their natural appetites. See eg: Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France, Index Locke, Diderot, Rousseau. See especially p 133:

 

"Paradoxically, the men who trusted so highly in the powers of intelligence regarded the mind as essentially vacant and inert; the idea of the passive mind was indispensable to their system.  it was the guarantee that the truths of nature might be perceived without distortion.  It was the basis for the distinction, then so important and so clear, between enlightenment and prejudice.  It was the metaphysical groundwork for the belief that men were equal, and that they possessed the quality of perfectibility, that is, susceptibility to progress.  Minimizing the effects of will, denying original predisposition, refusing to see any inevitability in human nature, the doctrine was flatly contrary to the Christian idea of sin; and by representing man as a passive child of circumstances, easily abused by his environment, it slipped sometimes into a notion that human nature, when crude, is good; and that order, restraint, discipline, and suppression are affronts to man's dignity and freedom."  Palmer, p 133, 134

 

For the Enlightenment thinkers, government was part of the problem, not the solution, and so it was with the colonists.

 

So when Krugman says something like this, claiming to criticize only the American right, he shows himself to be truly a Whig pundit idiot:

 

"It is, on the part of much of today’s right, a war on the very concept of community, of a society that uses the institution we call government to offer certain basic protections to all its members."

 

The founding fathers did not trust government, and refused to rely heavily on it, especially the federal one, even for protection.

 

They were mostly yoeman jacobin anarchists like Jefferson, or religious protestant radicals.

What Krugman attributes accusingly to Trump is actually, as Palmer shows in great detail, Krugman's own time honored Enlightenment Ideal itself: "... it slipped sometimes into a notion that human nature, when crude, is good; and that order, restraint, discipline, and suppression are affronts to man's dignity and freedom." RRP

Krugman's Enlightenment is the same as Trump's, the same as Rousseau's.

Krugman just doesn't realize it yet, nor do you:

"How, in speaking of men whom he calls null, brutish, stupid, imbecile, can he exalt with enthusiasm their antique simplicity, their original goodness, their primitive innocence?" 

 

"Has anyone ever said of an orang-outang that it was naturally good and happy wise and simple? or spoken of its antique simplicity, primitive innocence, and original goodness?"

 

"No, Jean-Jacques, I shall not treat you as a bad man for having dared to maintain that man is born good.  Everyone knows that man comes from his creator good, happy, wise, and perfect; no one disputes this truth.  What you are blamed for is your making man come from his creator in a state of stupidity, and yet maintain that in this state men are good, happy, wise, and simple.  What you are blamed for is making their goodness depend on their imbecility, their happiness on their stupidity.  What you are blamed for is your having been guilty in all your writings of an enormous abuse of language, and having offered us, as the true road to happiness, the ignorance, imbecility, and stupidity that you have not blushed to attribute to our first parents."

 

Le Gros, Examen des ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau et de Court de Gobelin (Geneve, 1786), pp 62 -66.