Remnants of ENG 221

On what basically amounts to a forum specifically for students of my ENG 221 class to discuss the reading assingments critically, everyone had a certain minimum number of posts per topic that had to be posted. Sometiems we’d get going into an interesting conversation and meeting the minimum was no problem. Other times it was more of a struggle. The post I’m about to quote is one that I wrote when going back and filling in where I had not met the minimum posts by one post for one day’s reading, so it didn’t result in further comment, but I thought it was interesting.

If you are already aware of Hobbes and his Leviathan, this will make even more sense, but suffice it to say that in a discussion that stemmed from an interpretation of literature from centuries ago, I accidentally found myself using Star Wars as an analogy:

Okay, I don’t mean to get into a Star Wars debate, but although Anakin says he does not want to be the one to decide, and though (it is believed that) he becomes Darth Vader later, it is not Darth Vader who is the sovereign, but the Emperor. I believe that in viewing the Star Wars epic, Hobbes would first be amazed (movies, or really anything this visually realistic and fantastic, did not exist in his time), but then would most likely judge against the supposed heroes of the series. He would say that the rebels and smugglers that went against the sovereign power of the Emperor should not ever be accepted into any society, and that if it were not for the Emperor’s reign, all humans in the galaxy would be at war with one another.

If you have seen Episode II, you can see that Senator Palpatine only assumes the role as sovereign and forms the army of the republic with the intention of quelling the uprisings present in a system with no clear sovereign, which Hobbes predicted would be the result. Hobbes would probably like Jar Jar Binks for nominating Palpatine to bring order to the chaos of all men warring against each other that was otherwise reducing the republic. In this way, Palpatine’s rise to power, just as Hitler’s, is supported by Hobbes’ arguments.