l men, protecting them "from the invasion of foreigners and the injuries of one another." Hobbes can be seen as an unabashed champion of coercion as social policy, hence a proponent of the most profound social conservatism. But by making a question of liberty into a question of will of those who make the social covenant, he also positions himself as an advocate of the rulers' responsibility to guarantee such liberty as the people enjoy in the society they have established as their organizing principle, which is consistent with classical political liberalism as well.
The overarching principle of social order implicates some form of uniform cultural endorsement of coercion or persuasion toward the forms of order itself. The embedment of that idea in Western political philosophy in the 16th century survived--in its less absolutist formulation--to the 18th century at the time of the founding of the US and at least indirectly informed the creation of the US Constitution. By and large, the 18th-century adaptation and balance of Hobbesian and Lockean ideas in the Constitution remained intact, at least as far as social organization was concerned. However, the found society was hardly exempt from scrutiny. In the early modern period, critical analyses of the state of the bourgeois Western culture were undertaken by such commentators as Nietzsche and Freud. By midcentury, such figures as Gandhi and Dr. King had formulated social critique as social action in egalitarian directions, in the process introducing historically disempowered constituencies to the possibilities of social transformation. To be sure, entrenched constituencies of power answered dissident voices with attempts to strengthen social controls and political uniformity, as the so-called McCarthy period of anticommunist activism, the murders of Dr. King and of Gandhi, the White House "plumbers," the Kent State episode, and other markers of Western culture attest. But from the late...