The Anglo-American tradition of constitutional thinking should be understood in this way, as addressing the question of how to limit the power of government, without losing its benefits. That
The Abbé Sieyès, in his inflammatory pamphlet, What is the Third Estate? of 1789, expressed the point succinctly. ‘The nation is prior to everything. It is the source of everything. Its will is always...
Sense of sacrifice is good but only if you’re sacrificing your own life; once you sacrifice another’s life you’ve overstepped the mark.
Nor should we be surprised that it is absent from the world of the Islamists – even though forgiveness has an important place in the practice of Islam and in the morality of the Koran.4
Music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
Looks are voluntary. But the full revelation of the subject in the face is not, as a rule, voluntary. Smiles are usually involuntary, and gift smiles, as one might call them, always so. Likewise laugh...
It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.
Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher’s motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual’s life is h...
Wanting it for its beauty is not wanting to inspect it: it is wanting to contemplate it—and that is something more than a search for information or an expression of appetite. Here is a want without a...
The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them.
No market economy can function properly without the support of legal and moral sanctions, designed to hold individual agents to their bargains, and to return the cost of misbehaviour to the one who ca...
Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly-wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.
Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.
In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day – communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism – Zweig saw the...
Drudgery means doing an ungrateful task for an ungrateful person – and anyone employed at the bottom of the labour market knows what that means. The
Spinoza left a celebrated description of his life’s endeavour: After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the...
Paul Benacerraf, ‘What Numbers Could Not Be,’ Philosophical Review (1965).
No linguistic behaviour can logically determine its own sequel, since no past time can logically determine the future. A man may 'follow a rule' as we do, and yet, at some future time, diverge from us...
If I am right, then enjoying music involves a kind of outward-going sympathetic movement. In music, as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrange...