Hobbes’s philosophy already contained every key bourgeois moral standard

Evidence

There is hardly a single bourgeois moral standard which has not been anticipated by the unequaled magnificence of Hobbes’s logic. He gives an almost complete picture, not of Man but of the bourgeois man, an analysis which in three hundred years has neither been outdated nor excelled. “Reason …is nothing but Reckoning”; “a free Subject, a free Will…[are] words …without meaning; that is to say, Absurd.” A being without reason, without the capacity for truth, and without free will—that is, without the capacity for responsibility—man is essentially a function of society and judged therefore according to his “value or worth …his price; that is to say so much as would be given for the use of his power.” This price is constantly evaluated and re-evaluated by society, the “esteem of others,” depending upon the law of supply and demand. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 380

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core of Arendt’s reading: Hobbes’s ‘bourgeois man’ as a being without reason, free will, or responsibility, valued only by social price.
• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding goal of extracting the concept of the bourgeois subject as groundwork for later Islamophobia-field notions of the constructed, functionally-defined modern subject.