Lloyd George to discuss Welsh coal mining after
breakfast in London, and the fate of the Arabs before dinner in Paris.
For the possibility of bringing any aspect of human affairs within the
range of judgment breaks the spell which has lain upon political
ideas. There have, of course, been plenty of men who did not realize
that the range of attention was the main premise of political science.
They have built on sand. They have demonstrated in their own persons
the effects of a very limited and self-centered knowledge of the
world. But for the political thinkers who have counted, from Plato and
Aristotle through Machiavelli and Hobbes to the democratic theorists,
speculation has revolved around the self-centered man who had to see
the whole world by means of a few pictures in his head.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY
1
THAT groups of self-centered people would engage in a struggle for
existence if they rubbed against each other has always been evident.
This much truth there is at any rate in that famous passage in the
Leviathan where Hobbes says that "though there had never been any time
wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another,
yet at all times kings and _persons_ of _sovereign authority
because_ of their _independency_, are in continual jealousies
and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons
pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another.
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