You Reap What You Sow
In a recent debate online someone complained to me, after I had pointed to one problem with idea of the Sovereign in Leviathan, that Thomas Hobbes would not have cared about such things as the “fact-value dichotomy”. He went on to assert that the analytics were simply misinterpreting the Enlightenment. I think he is mistaken.
It is true that Hobbes would not have ‘cared’ about the fact-value dichotomy. Indeed, he would have barely been able to make any sense of the idea if you were to pose it to him. But this does not make what he did, any less relevant to it. Hobbes (and later Hume and Rousseau) laid the groundwork for what Nietzsche would later make conscious through his storytelling, and what analytics like Mackie and Russell would systematize through their critiques of ethics and metaphysics in the wake of it all.