The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

Perhaps no mind has ever so united all the spearpoints of philosophy in one phalanx against him, but the Beast of Malmesbury—Hobbes’s title, as saturated with dread as the Patriarch’s with honor—used Reason’s highest arts to paint portraits of Nature, God, and Man so perfect that not one brushstroke could be criticized, yet so abominable that they left the reader unable to respect humanity. So desperately Hobbes’s readers cried, “We are not brutes! We do not hate and fear each other so! Humanity is a fair race! Noble! Good!” But they could not prove it, not against Hobbes’s flawless descriptions of the realities of human malice. All the land’s horses and all the land’s men could not cure the Hobbesian infection, not for the twenty years it took John Locke to develop his Blank Slate, the only antitoxin. And even with that antitoxin in our reading list, Leviathan looms still from time to time, when some new dreadful deed of humankind reminds us how well Hobbes’s cold, aggressive war of all on all describes our state.