I have to admit I'm a little perplexed by your reading of Hobbes.
What specifically perplexes you?
I will admit I was being purposefully glib with my initial comments re Hobbes; I do not think
Leviathan (which is all I’ve read of Hobbes) is without valuable insights. However, I simply think the
state of Nature heuristic is needlessly simplistic and speculative—being anterior to discourse, among other things—and is moreover an especially dubious metric for evaluating human action, in no small part because it’s intrinsically regressive (something I think even its believers and adherents would admit is the case). Even mostly agreeing with Rousseau—that self-interest alone cannot account for the cooperative condition that makes a human "human," and that it cannot be disentangled from the "natural repugnance to seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer"—I nonetheless question the validity of arguing that these principles exist or existed as "principles prior to reason" (though at least Rousseau, to his credit, acknowledges how difficult an endeavor it is to perform "experiments […] to know natural man").
Furthermore—and you may notice that my reading of Hobbes is heavily inflected with Rousseau—"force does not make right," and thus the civil state—which, following Aristotle, I hold to be commensurate with the human’s natural state—applies itself to "substituting justice for instinct". It is in this spirit that I reject
bellicosity for all against all as an accurate description of the human condition, concurring again with Rousseau: "the state of war, far from being natural to man, is born of peace, or at least the precautions men have taken to secure lasting peace."
Who do you subscribe to closest, in terms of political philosophy?
As for my personal predilections: a single subscription would be difficult for me to claim. If, in terms of practical political philosophy, my mindset were imagined a piece of meat, I guess you could call it an Aristotelian cut with significant Machiavellian republican marbling—non-trivially seasoned with notions like Tocqueville’s skepticism of democracy (at least qua its American formulation), Foucault’s discomfort with the modes of surveillance and incarceration deployed by contemporary institutions as the mechanical foundations of their authority, and Rousseau's somewhat quixotic notion that the spirit of the Social Contract is to force people to be free—all roasted over a nice, heaping Platonic pyre.
And I would’ve cited Plato—and the
Republic,
Protagoras, and
Phaedo specifically—but it’s my reading that he doesn’t so much as supply an answer (as Aristotle attempts in
Politics), as asserts a global strategy for thinking: the imperative of both questioning and being mindful of context. Or, as Eliot (care of Dante) might say:
sovegna vos—which probably comes as close to a personal credo as I could get.
