So...what do you foresee, or recommend, as a political realignment? (Anything beyond an actual or de facto one party state?) I wish I had good ideas of my own...

Australia is an immigrant and diasporic nation. I don't see that the cosmopolitan folks who see the globalised world as an oppurtunity, rather than something to be walled out, exist exclusively in 'the left'.

Brian, No need for realignment. The best statement of national ambition under globalisation I have read was Paul Keatings;

I believe we can show a clean pair of heels to the rest of the world. Germany has a 4.5% inflation rate; Japan's is about 4 per cent. But the fact is, Germany is most ossified country in Europe, you've just about got to get a license to walk the dog ... in Japan they're still in show boxes; they might have a dresser full of US Treasury bonds, but they don't have what we have here. This is a truly pluralistic, tolerant society. It's got values, it's got standards, it's got good accommodation, it cares about the environment. And we have other things. We are one nation occupying a continent, and that makes us unique.

And we are changing. This is a multicultural society and a very tolerant one. We've succeeded in this where many other countries have failed. And we're resource rich, so why drag ourselves along the ground? We can clean those other countries up. We can clean them all up. I was down in Melbourne talking to a Labor Party dinner not so long ago, and everyone there was dragging themselves around. And I said to them, how could you be so down and out tonight in Melbourne? There are these lovely restaurants, spring coming, the trees starting to blossom, you feel good to be alive.

But these are not the only things we have. We have enormous opportunity.

I agree with him.

Brian,
David Goodhart writes:

Creating a plausible "third way" for the security and identity issues - appealing to both the liberal and the anxious - is hard but not impossible. Contrary to the leftist caricature, those citizens who are anxious about rapid change are not all xenophobes; and contrary to the rightwing caricature, most reasonable liberals accept the need for national borders and for balancing individual rights against national security.

This suggests that we are moving away from the 1990s way of understanding these issues.

Cameron,
true. Liberalism is cosmpolitanism and there are conservative liberals.

But the ALP in Australia has had great difficulties in electorally working the fault line between cosmopolitanism and nationality.

Cameron,
sadly, the Beazley-led ALP has backed away from Keating's synthesis---because it has gone socially conservative under pressure from Howard and allowed the machine Right to run the show.

Gary, The brilliance of Keating was the pure national ambition he had. It rubbed off, you believed that there was going to be a Greater Australia. Howard and Beazley lack that kind of national ambition. They are uninspiring.

Hobbes' Leviathan functions as a great antidote to excessive postmod. bickering, conceptualization and to belle-lettrism of all sorts. The Leviathanesque sovereign, at least in principle, is not tyrannical; he's merely enforcing the covenant that men freely chose (tho' some may be forced to enter the covenants).

Hobbes was no friend of theocrats or aristocrats: more like a republican who felt a strong monarchy was the most effective strategy for maintaining order. His ideas on contracts, covenants, the state of nature, sovereignity, etc. are still worth reading closely and worth reading in the King's English--he's not that difficult a writer and indeed rather eloquent. Of course his materialism was very influential--not only to Locke and the sensationalists, but to Marx and utilitarians. His critique of Descartes and the res cogitans also very worthwhile.

Hobbes anticipates Darwin, or at the very least understood territoriality and the problems of altruism, or lack thereof. He's at least as powerful a thinker as Hegel and Marx were; indeed I would venture to say rather more powerful. Descartes may have been his superior, at least mathematically; but in political terms there are few thinkers equal to his force.

J.
I'm not sure how we get to Hobbes from the electoral squeeze faced by social democratic parties.

As I understand the Hobbesian social contract we have a tradeoff-- in entering the social contract to establish the authority of the state an individual gives up part of their freedom in order to enjoy the rest.This passage from a state of nature of a war of all against all to the civil state is held to involve a gain.

The individualistic principles of modern natural law form a tradition developed by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant; a tradition that is critiqued by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right around the notion of freedom as the absence of external impediments. This conception of freedom is what Isaiah Berlin calls the negative concept of liberty.

Do I take it that you associate the positive notion of liberty with postmodernism?