In Jerry Z. Muller’s The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought, one finds a detailed description of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in the context of the anti-commerce/anti-market era in which it was written. Hobbes questioned his era’s Christian virtues of faith, honor and glory coupled with the vices of Industry, material well-being and individualism. Muller writes of Leviathan
Instead of religious other-worldliness, its vision is resolutely this-worldly; and the secular world it seeks to forge is not one of warriors and rulers, but of individuals living in peace, prosperity and intellectual development.
Muller describes just how different these ideas were
Hobbes knew that he was undertaking a transvaluation of values, some of which took the form of the redefinition of character traits. Those which had been regarded as virtues in the Christian tradition such as piety and faith, were redescribed as superstition and credulity. The passion for honor, glory and command so valued in the civic republican tradition were treated primarily as causes of contention and war. […] Parts of Leviathan, therefore, take the form of what the rhetoricians of [Hobbes’] day . . . called “paradiastole,” the method of rhetorical redescription by which what had been defined as vices could be redescribed as virtues, and vice versa.
This sounded eerily familiar in wake of Bush’s inaugural speech: did he know that its rhetoric was a “transvaluation of values,” particularly conservative ones? As one writer put it
The speech was in almost no way that of a conservative. To the contrary. It amounted to a thoroughgoing exaltation of the state.
What conservatives once considered vices: faith in government, utopian vision of democracy and Wilsonian idealism have become — courtesy the Bush administration — virtues:
From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. […] Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
Bush continued
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.
This new “paradiastole” thoroughly confuses the ideology that demands limited goverment and a healthy skepticism of all things collective with a dangerous faith in the power of government and disregard for all the costs of its actions. Today, those who demand cost considerations find mainstream conservatives labelling them “anti-American,” while others who demonstrate the futility of such policies are ignored. To echo Muller, what had been defined as vices are now virtues, and vice versa. Virtues as these are all but lost
She [America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
