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Category: history

Final Words From Burke

Final Words From Burke

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….

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Burke Foresees Napoleon

Burke Foresees Napoleon

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…

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How People Form Attachments to Their Communities

How People Form Attachments to Their Communities

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…

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Folkraed: A New Approach to Government – The Second Problem With the Way Things Are: Bad Voters

Folkraed: A New Approach to Government – The Second Problem With the Way Things Are: Bad Voters

Last post we talked about problems with our politicians, but most voters aren’t any better. In fact, they’re often worse. Most politicians at least know something about the major issues of the day; most voters don’t. Economists say that voters’ ignorance is rational: because each persons’ vote has such a small marginal impact on an election result, it doesn’t make sense to spend much time learning about the candidates or issues. What makes sense for each voter to do on…

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Folkraed: A New Approach to Government – Introduction

Folkraed: A New Approach to Government – Introduction

Many of us feel like something is going wrong. We feel a deep and growing unease we are moving in the wrong direction, that we’re becoming strangers in our own country. This series of blog posts is an extended essay that explains what is going wrong in the United States and what we can do about it. But first you must realize that the solution won’t come from going back to the way things were. The past is behind us….

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Meet the 18 non-Christian American presidents

Meet the 18 non-Christian American presidents

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…

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