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...
Western democracies did not create the virtue of citizenship; on the contrary, they grew from it. Nothing is more evident in The Federalist than the public spirit that it puts in play, in opposition t...
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...
Unlike the Medicare provisions, which were brought in by negotiation between the two principal parties, ‘Obamacare’ was the initiative of a single party, did not have the consent of the opposition and...
The opportunity to live our lives as we will; the security of impartial law, through which our grievances are answered and our hurts restored; the protection of our environment as a shared asset, whic...
The long-term effect of this has been to open Western societies to immigration, and to impart an ideal of citizenship that, it is hoped, will enable people of disparate origins and backgrounds to live...
The first is that the conservative cause has been polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking o...
The assault on the human world in the name of science is more pseudo-science than science, and rejoices in its bald, unmoralised image of 'what we really are'.What we really are from the scientific po...
Smith did not regard economic freedom as the sum of politics, nor did he believe that self-interest is the only, or even the most important, motive governing our economic behaviour. A market can deliv...
Ray Honeyford was an upright, conscientious teacher, who believed it to be his duty to prepare children for responsible life in society, and who was confronted with the question of how to do this, whe...
One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment is that we can form communities without necessaily agreeing on ultimate metaphysical grounds. We know that to a great extent that the principles of social c...
Oakeshott believed that civil association has been increasingly displaced by enterprise, under pressure from political elites, managers, parties and ideologues. It is not only socialists with their go...
Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to form...
Moreover, in discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, em...
Little Platoons' are the places where traditions form. Social traditions, Burke pointed out, are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, and the inherited solutions to...
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...
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...
Given that Europe’s legacy to the world consists in the two great goods of Christianity and democracy it is hardly surprising if the EU no longer has the endorsement of the European people, even if it...
But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists.
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...