Burke rejected the liberal idea of the social contract, as a deal agreed among living people. Society, he argued, does not contain the living only; it is an association between the dead, the living an...
At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rig...
And in answering that question he saw the inside of that bleak Viking world, the reality of love and compassion that all these hammer-throwing and skull-smashing gods concealed. That
A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in author...
When the chips are down, Orwell argued, our workers do not defend their class but their country, and they associate their country with a gentle way of life in which unusual and eccentric habits – such...
We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. W...
Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was one—quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid toda...
Enemies can be confronted only if they are first brought to earth. And that means bringing them to earth somewhere, as the Americans brought al-Qa‘eda to earth in Afghanistan. Globalization may have m...
And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There is indeed such a thing as society; bu...
Unless and until people identify themselves with the country, its territory and its cultural inheritance – in something like the way people identify themselves with a family – the politics of compromi...
The very same ‘mystery’ that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.
Neuro-nonsense occurs when people take on board the supposed discoveries of neuroscience – all these brain images that tell us, for instance, that we’ve discovered now exactly what love is, it’s this...
Dutilleux and