Gradually this truth is beginning to dawn on the political class, so that even socialists have come to accept that the poor are not helped by taking revenge against the rich, but by opening the doors...
Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings.
Nacionalismo, como uma ideologia, é perigoso apenas à medida que as ideologias são perigosas. Ocupa o espaço deixado vago pela religião e, ao fazê-lo, estimula o verdadeiro crente a venerar a ideia na...
When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had capitalism as thei...
We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the qu...
We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselv...
The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'p...
The diagnosis of these errors follows a common pattern. Each attempt by pure reason to establish the metaphysical doctrines towards which it is impelled transgresses the limits of experience, applying...
The bitter thought against which Don Juan hopelessly rebels is the same thought that contains the promise of Tristan's consolation: the thought of death. Don Juanism and Tristanism are extreme respons...
Over a large range of cases, environmental problems arise from our entirely reasonable habit of taking the benefits of our activities, while passing on the costs. The environment is degraded because w...
Kant enjoyed the company of women (provided that they did not pretend to understand the Critique of Pure Reason) and
It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists
In his Reflections on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued against the ‘geometrical’ politics, as he called it, of the French revolutionaries – a politics that proposed a rational goal, and a co...
He describes a particular faculty, reason, in its illegitimate employment; he also demolishes all the claims to knowledge that this faculty tempts us to make.
Habits of secrecy, made necessary by the actual relations between states, violate the ‘transcendental formula of public right’, which is that an action is wrong if it is not compatible with being made...
But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists.
The growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people...
Society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To
Law of nature that our scientific thinking tends toward the truth, our morality toward the good, and maybe (though he doesn’t go this far) our tastes toward the beautiful.
In a thousand ways people combine not just in circles of friendship but in formal associations, willingly adopting and submitting to rules and procedures that regiment their conduct and make them acco...