The battle between liberal and neoconservative moralists who are concerned with human rights and tragic realists who are concerned with security, balance-of-power politics, and economic matters is a variation on the dispute between the twentieth-century liberal humanist Isaiah Berlin and the seventeenth-century monarchist Thomas Hobbes:
In May of 1953, while the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust were still smoldering and Stalin’s grave was fresh, Isaiah Berlin delivered a spirited lecture against “historical inevitability” — the whole range of belief, advocated by Hobbes and others, according to which individuals and their societies are determined by their past, their civilization, and even their biology and environment. Berlin argued that adherence to historical inevitability, so disdainful of the very characteristics that make us human, led to Nazism and communism — both of them extreme attempts to force a direction onto history. Hobbes is just one of many famous philosophers Berlin castigated in his lecture, but it is Hobbes’s bleak and elemental philosophy that most conveniently sums up what Berlin and other moralists so revile.Hobbes suggested that even if human beings are nobler than apes, they are nevertheless governed by biology and environment. According to Hobbes, our ability to reason is both a mask for and a slave to our passions, our religions arise purely from fear, and theories about our divinity must be subordinate to the reality of how we behave. Enlightened despotism is thus preferable to democracy: the masses require protection from themselves. Hobbes, who lived through the debacle of parliamentary rule under Cromwell, published his translation of Thucydides in order, he said, to demonstrate how democracy, among other factors, was responsible for Athens’s decline. Reflecting on ancient Athens, the philosopher James Harrington, a contemporary and follower of Hobbes, remarked that he could think of “nothing more dangerous” than “debate in a crowd.”
From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).