This, too, shall pass

...One of the reasons it will pass is that the U.S...

...then it dissolved during the rise of American involvement in Vietnam...

...While we all pray that this will be the definitive era of good feelings, the permanent detente, nonetheless, if the history of the past half-century is any reliable guide, we have to expect that this too will pass...

...But nearly all eighteenth-century English, Scottish, and American thinking about human nature - including the thinking of the men who drafted the Constitution - was deeply dyed with Hobbesian colors...

...The idea of human nature reflected in the Constitution written two-hundred years ago in Philadelphia is more or less Hobbesian in character...

...The first began when the U.S...

...The fifth era was the Nixon-Brezhnev detente of the early- to middle-seventies - a detente that began vanishing, like the Cheshire cat, soon after it appeared, and vanished completely, leaving not even Jimmy Carter's smile behind, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in late 1979...

...THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS THE FUTURE OF U.S.-SOVIET GOOD WILL It all depends on how you define and count these things, but according to my reckoning, the newly inaugurated era of good feelings between the United States and the Soviet Union is at least the sixth such since the 1930s...

...and the Soviet Union are great powers with overlapping spheres of interest...

...It had been part of the program of all republics, ancient, medieval, and modern...

...Given- this idea of human nature, there is no reason in principle why vast and relatively unchecked power should not be entrusted to small groups of people...

...The third era of good feelings began in the mid- to late-fifties with the rise of Khrushchev and "the spirit of Camp David...

...with such potentially saintly human material, why not proceed to build heaven on earth...

...What made the Hobbesian idea of human nature especially acceptable to eighteenth-century Americans was no doubt its similarity to the Augustinian idea of human nature after the Fall...

...To such ears, Hobbes rang true...

...And eighteenth-century America was a Protestant nation whose Protestantism was still richly flavored, through Calvin, with Augustinianism...

...Nor is there any reason that government should confine itself to traditional goals...

...If average human nature is egoistic and self-seeking, then we had better design our political institutions to guard against the aggressions of self-interested persons or groups, who would be sure to abuse too liberal a grant of power...

...it produced the landmark nuclear test ban treaty of 1963...

...They disputed the last 10 percent only...

...The goals they put forward in the preamble were the customary aims of government (justice, defense, general welfare, domestic tranquillity...

...The fourth era commenced with the successful resolution of the Cuban missile impasse...

...they were not...

...In fact the Hobbesian anthropology was a secularized version of the Augustinian anthropology, much as Benjamin Franklin's business ethic was a secularized version of the Protestant Ethic...

...Given a desire to protect freedom, then, the American system of elaborate, almost extravagant, checks and balances follows from the Hobbesian or semi-Hobbesian premises of the Founding Fathers...

...indeed, since each may be said to have an interest in every inch of this increasingly small earth, their spheres of interest in a sense overlap totally...

...Like the baby carriage on the Odessa Steps, this era bounced down the stairs toward catastrophe: the Gary Powers U-2 incident, the cancellation of the Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit, the rise of Soviet-Cuban friendship, the Bay of Pigs, the unfortunate Khrushchev-Kennedy summit in Vienna, the erection of the Berlin Wall, and finally (doom awaiting at the bottom of the stairs), the Cuban missile-crisis of October 1962...

...extended full diplomatic recognition to the USSR early in the FDR administration, an event that roughly coincided with the Comintern's strategy of the "popular front" against fascism...

...and for one hundred years it had been in the program of that republic-disguised-as-a-monarchy, Britain...

...Even those who made a career of refuting Hobbes did so after conceding that he was 90 percent correct...

...What follows from the Hobbesian starting point is a non-utopian goal for government...

...But if we are designing political institutions, as they were doing in Philadelphia in 1787, it makes no difference at all...

...Yet another reason it will pass is that, for all the talk of "convergence" and for all of Gorbachev's glasnost and peres-troika, deep philosophical differences divide the two nations - differences having to do above all with divergent ideas of human nature that have been built into their respective political institutions...

...If we are discussing intimate groups, such as friendships and families, it makes a big difference whether we are pure Hobbesians or semi-Hobbesians...

...The Founders had no plan to build heaven on earth...

...This era came to a crashing end in late August 1939, when Stalin and Hitler created their infamous "non-aggression" pact, the green light for World War II...

...Therefore, we must embrace this latest detente and try to maximize its benefits...

...Even the goal of securing the "blessings of liberty" was nothing innovative...

...What this came down to in practice was an admission that average human nature was inspired by self-interested motives almost all the time...

...Hobbes, indeed, had gone further: he had said that every single person, not just the average person, was motivated by self-interest all the time, not just almost all the time...

...While doing so, however, we must bear in mind that there are powerful forces, both political and philosophical, that doom this era of Soviet-American good feelings, like all previous ones, to a relatively brief duration...

...This is not to say that all the Founding Fathers were disciples of Hobbes...

...Thus the recent Washington summit is the commencement of the sixth era of Soviet-American good feelings...

...The second era lasted from the summer of 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, until the end of the war, at which time the Iron Curtain dropped on Eastern Europe and the Cold War began...

...It sees human beings as essentially altruistic, at least once their basic personal needs have been taken care of...

...At the level of practical politics, of course, the fundamental rule is that we have to live with people we do not agree with, even with people we dislike...

...And it seems to be in the nature of things that powers with overlapping spheres of interest, especially great powers, inevitably find that their interests seriously collide with one another...

...In contrast to the American idea of human nature, the Soviet idea derives, through Marx, from Rousseau...