Philpropsophy

John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) is a majestic tale of a prophecy, a king, his wizardly guardian, and the many heroes of his quest. This makes for awesome battle scenes, no doubt, as well as slow-motion 80s sex scenes that always involve the presence of a fire place, fire pit, or 30-plus candles, and bad 80s hair. A byproduct of battle scenes, and sex that eventually leads to more battle scenes, is a lot of dead people.

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At the foundation of modern moral justifications for the establishment of a coercive state is the voluntarization of that coercive power – in other words, the implication that obedience to governments is in some way chosen and thus morally binding. The philosophical construct that has come to embody this approach is described by the term “social contract.” Though the works of important philosophers like Hobbes and Locke employed a version of the social contract, the work which came to inhabit and popularize the phrase was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential 1762 treatise, Du Contrait Social (“The Social Contract”).

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