Thomas Hobbes, looking appropriately severe.  You're not going to find him particularly easy going.  The solution?  Read him twice, or maybe three times.  The Leviathan, from which your reading is abstracted, is  found in its entirety at the website linked to Hobbes' portrait to the left.  Also there, and considereably easier to understand is the essay Liberty This is worth your time, and I recommend it to you.
Some Hobbes-isms, from LibertyThe body of this essay consists largely of twenty or so "Laws of Nature" concerning living in civil communities.  These are so humane and welcoming that I think the artist must have caught Thomas on a bad day.  In hope that you'll go scout up all of them, here are a couple of my favorites, taken out of order:

...as the Lawes of Nature are nought else but the dictates of Reason, so as, unlesse a man endeavour to preserve the faculty of right reasoning, he cannot observe the
Lawes of Nature, it is manifest, that he, who knowingly, or willingly, doth ought, whereby the rationall faculty may be destroyed, or weakned, he knowingly, and willingly, breaks the Law of nature: For there is no difference between a man who
performes not his Duty, and him who does such things willingly, as make it impossible for him to doe it.

That it is prescribed by the Law of nature, that no man either by deeds, or words,
countenance, or laughter, doe declare himselfe to hate, or scorne another.

Since therefore many common Rights are retained by those who enter into a peaceable state, and that many peculiar ones are also acquired, hence ariseth this
ninth dictate of the naturall Law, to wit, That what Rights soever any man challenges to himselfe, he also grant the same as due to all the rest: otherwise he frustrates the equality acknowledged in the former Article.

But there is no man who is not sometimes in a quiet mind; At that time therefore
there is nothing easier for him to know, though he be never so rude and unlearn'd, then this only Rule, That when he doubts, whether what he is now doing to another, may be done by the Law of Nature, or not, he conceive himselfe to be in that others
stead. Here instantly those perturbations which perswaded him to the fact, being now cast into the other scale, disswade him as much: And this Rule is not onely easie, but is Anciently celebrated in these words, Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne
feceris: Do not that to others, you would not have done to your self.
Looking AheadI'll be asking you to write something for me (at home) the next week.  I'll probably hand it out on  Thursday or Friday.
Read, in Greer and Lewis, Chapter 9

The Reformation can be seen as an extension of the Renaissance and first we'll spend some of our time discussing it.  Focus most of your attention  in this chapter on the section concerning political and social forces (pp. 363 - 364),  and especially on Calvinism, the Calvinist Ethic, and the creation of the Church of England, pp. 369-380.  It is out of the "Elizabethan Compromise" that the American experiment comes.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of early American history is well aware of the influence of the Reformation on the development of Colonial America, especially Colonial New England.  Because the early European  settlers in our region were concerned with establishing an enduring society, they pioneered in extended thinking about political philosophy.   I want you to locate and read two documents by John Winthrop, first governor of  Massachusetts Bay.  These are available on the Internet.  The first of these outlines the idea of the social contract under which Purtan Massachusetts Bay was founded.  It was a sermon, preached on board the ship Arabella before the founding parties landed, and is most commonly titled, A Model of Christian Charity.
Winthrop was an able, though authoritarian, Governor.  He served in that postion most of the early years of Massachusetts Bay.  At one point in his career he was brought before the court on charges related to his handling of  Colonial affairs, and he defended himself in one of the most famous courtoom speeches in American History.  It defines his theory of the relationship between Magistrate (the governor) and the people (the governed) and is most frequently titled On Liberty.  Both these texts predate Hobbes and Locke, about whom we've read in Greer and Lewis, and whom we'll meet in our documents over the next couple of classes.

Print off copies of both these documents and bring them to class
WEEK of March 5, 2001
The Reformation and Democratic Ideals
Reaction Paper I  Due!
Read, in Idea of Democracy
#5  "The Social Contract"  by Thomas Hobbes, pp. 17- 23

One of the consistent themes of the new thought rising from the Renaissance and the Reformation was a persistent attempt to understand the reason for the ways things were.  Among other things, this led to a renewed in history (looking for causal reasons) and philosophy as a tool for explaining human institutions, including society itself.  Hobbes addresses this specific question:  why did societies arise in the first place?  The answer he poses sets a new frame of reference for understanding democracy and democratic institutions.