The Pre-Modern Idea of Politics

Government and people are still separate, but we're locked together in a kind of mechanical embrace. We authorize them, they act for us. What's odd about this idea is that it's more confusing than the ancient idea. Politics does often feel like a choice between Are you on the side of the people or the government? That makes sense as a choice. Getting away from that choice feels constraining and odd. Yet, the idea of the modern state is the most powerful, the most successful, and as Hobbes shows, the most frightening idea in the history of political ideas. And it is the one that rules our world still, for now anyway, and maybe for a long time to