thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Theodore Dalrymple has a rather slight but nonetheless helpful piece on what’s wrong with rights. His basic point seems to be that when something becomes a “right” there’s no further need for civility, reasonableness or mutual accommodation, so the more rights the more brutish social life becomes.
The exhilarating marketplace of ideas and free thought, Anno Domini 2004:
So why are the Americans more religious than the Europeans? There have been a variety of explanations:
are continuing to reinvent the people’s democracy: Belgium declares major political party a criminal organization because it’s not PC enough. Meawhile, the English vindicate their reputation for free speech, fair play and proper conduct by throwing trash and threatening with imprisonment the head of a major party of another European state, because he might say … More ...
He rather exaggerates the opposition between American and other conservatism:
… More ...“There can be no doubt that the promise of America is a promise of personal liberty, of freedom of contract, movement, and belief … If there is anything on which all European conservatives have always agreed, however, it is the value and importance of
David Gress, a Danish classicist and historian, wrote a discussion some years back of the differences between American and European conservatism. The discussion isn’t altogether coherent (I think some lines were dropped when The World and I put it on the web) but includes some interesting material. I’m likely to take up some … More ...
F. A. Hayek’s 1960 discussion of “Why I Am Not a Conservative” is a useful statement of the arguments in favor of classical liberalism over conservatism. Naturally, I think there are serious problems with them, mostly having to do with Hayek’s agnosticism, which I don’t think works to ground a free social order:
The exchange keeps rolling (previous parts here, here, here and here). Here’s an edited version of the most recent installment:
… More ...Liberal Lawyer: On what basis do you claim that representational democracy with divided powers and charters guaranteeing individual rights were inventions of Catholicism?
Jim Kalb: I said “representative government with distributed powers
My liberal lawyer correspondent continues the discussion (previous exchanges here, here and here). Here’s an edited version of the most recent part of the exchange:
… More ...Liberal Lawyer: I strongly believe that the comprehensive liberals about which Hitchcock complains are pursuing things that fundamentally conflict with basic political liberalism as proposed by John Stuart
I’ve written some things denouncing the “tyranny of liberalism,” and here at Turnabout we’ve had a number of entries describing how that tendency is playing itself out in Canada. There’s a brief article at First Things worth reading as a summary of the latter point. A detail that reveals something about where things stand: the … More ...