To finish up my series of posts about Burke’s ’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), here are a few other assorted profound and interesting passages from Reflections. In this first passage (p. 14), Burke writes about being true to your proper character: Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for thei greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. In this passage (pp….
Continuing my series of posts excerpting interesting passages from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in this passage (pp. 315-310), Burke describes some of the problems with how the revolutionaries are changing the military, and foresees the rise of a Napoleon-like “popular general” who becomes master of the army, “the master . . . of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.”: What you may do finally does not appear, nor…
More from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In this passage (pp. 285-6) he is still discussing the problems with the revolutionaries scheme for splitting the country up into administrative units of equally sized square segments; he points out that our attachments and communities are formed from the bottom up and are not imposed from the top down: To a person who takes a view of the whole, the strength of Paris, thus formed, will appear a…
Over at GNXP, Razib Khan points out the errors1 some media commentators have made when they’ve claimed that if Mitt Romney wins the 2012 presidential election, he would be the first non-Christian president in the United States, or at least the first president outside of “orthodox” Christianity.2 3 Razib points out that this is simply not true – we have had non-Christian presidents before, and cites President Taft (a Unitarian) as an example. Well, as it turns out, we have…
Even though the 2012 presidential elections are still over a year away, the news is already saturated with stories about the Republican candidates campaigning. We all take for granted that democracy is the ideal system of government, and that our system of elections is an ideal way to select our country’s leaders. But is it? Being a politician requires two completely different skill sets: campaigning skills and governing skills. The two skills sets are very different from one another. A…
Do we have a right to receive an education in the same way that we have a right to free speech? Do we have a right to healthcare in the same way that we have a right to own property? We often use the word “right” without thinking much about what the word actually means and without considering what the government is obligated to do about our rights. There are actually two very different conceptions of rights, and these two…