People who profess liberation often disparage past leaders of the liberation movement as if those leaders had been reactionary conservatives. For instance, Paul, in Christian religion, and Hobbes in philosophy.

Paul was set against Peter by the Prussian Protestors, who were atheists as far as the Church was concerned. Paul, who wrote the Magna Carta of Christianity ( Letter to the Galatians) was their spiritual leader in the conflict between their blind Faith in Power and the Law of Jews and Catholics - Catholics were considered by them as reformed Jews/Pharisees.

Paul was once again employed by the German theologians who were sympathetic to the national socialist movement that eventually developed into German Fascism - fascists were also influenced by the materialistic power concept of the misinterpreted immoralist Nietzsche.

Hobbes was denounced by the Church as the anti-clerical leader of the negative critical philosophy, and that he certainly was. Modern editions of the Catholic Encyclopedia associate the inception of the Enlightenment period with Hobbes.

Hobbes had a tremendous influence on the Continent, in France and Germany, particulary on leaders of the budding new "science" of sociology - Auguste Comte through Max Weber. The latter was literally a devotee of Hobbes. Ironically, it was under Weber's inaugural university rationalization - that Might makes the World Power State Right - a concept derived from the philosophy of Hobbes - that Germany moved so violently against Hobbes' homeland, intending to save England from its decrepitude by making it a vassal state, and then turning against the rest of the world as well since the world was ripe for redivision. Weber wanted a "charismatic" man, one who was gifted with divine power, to lead the way; Germany got its charismatic man, but he was the demonic angel.

Another irony appertains to Spinoza, who inspired Fichte and others, in patriotic Liberty's name, to their German Romanticism, to their effusive rationalization of the Spirit or Power - Fichte's utopian Germany was as totalitarian as Spinoza's axiomatic formalism - hence we have an excommunicated Jew's philosophy eventually distorted into a justification for the extermination of Jews.

Once the revolutionary tomcats get out of the bag, their followers in self-defense would organize yet another bureaucracy to behead or burn charismatic enthusiasts. The Protestants, led by Luther and Calvin, became every bit as repressive and hateful as the Catholics.

What brought all this to mind: I was reviewing an old study I had made of Comte. I revisited his remarks on Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle. Of course they were all denounced as atheists at one time or another. I once enjoyed Bayle's demonstration in his dictionary, by way of extensive footnotes, that Spinoza was an atheist! Of course Fichte was charged with the same crime during the great Atheist Controversy in Germany. All "free thinkers" were allegedly atheists. Such was the Enlightenment. I found this excerpt from Comte in my notes:

"Three great men led the philosophical revolution... Hobbes first, then Spinoza, and finally Bayle, who, a Frenchman by birth, was obliged to go to Holland to work freely, Spinoza, under the special influence of the Cartesian principle [soul freed from mechanical body, so scientific research can continue without theological hindrance], no doubt aided the emancipation of many systematic minds, of which indeed we have proofs in the multitude of refutations aroused by his audacitous metaphysics; but he cannot be called the founder of the negative philosophy, both because he followed Hobbes, and because of the highly abstract nature of his obscure dogmatic exposition admits of no sufficiently marked social use. Bayle's labors [skeptical Bayle, who learned his skepticism from the Jesuit priest Arriago, wound up comparing reason to acid, saying it eats through the substratum and drops into the abyss, and that caused him no discomfort whatsoever] had this last quality; but the discontented character of his partial attacks, even more than chronological considerations, marks him out as the leader of the propagation of the doctrine rather than as one of its framers; though he undoubtedly had a share in its formation. We are thus obliged to regard Hobbes as the father of the revolutionary philosphy. We shall find that he held a much higher position than this, as one of the chief precursors of the true positive [i.e. loosely, scientific] polity; but he was also the author of some of the most important critical views which have been attributed to men of the suceeding century [and now further] who were only the propagators of them [e.g. Locke, Hume, Bentham - the utilitarians- associational psychology, the radical liberals, etc]. In this philosophy, the anti-theological analysis is urged as far as the metaphysical spirit admits; and it therefore afford the best opportunity for constrasting the negative philosophy with the positive, with which superficial inquirers are very apt to confound it. The negative doctrine, improperly called atheism [my final analysis of the atheism controversy was that it is irrelevant; i.e. religion has become simply a was to cloak 'materialism' with good feelings], is simply a phase of the ancient philosophy...."