In order to flourish, democracy must be firmly grounded in principle. In order to remain stable, power must be decentralized, and therefore liberty and equality under the law must be valued over abstract and ambiguous ideals such as “equality” or “progress.” I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think [...]
Drawing from history, our founders understood that liberty and justice could not exist in the same neighborhood as censorship. The solution for our current state, then, is not censorship but civility and a steadfast clinging to the American principles codified in our founding documents, which must be common and applicable to all equally under the [...]
Liberal education is about absorbing the great traditions of the past in order to form one’s own faculty of judgment, aiming at the end of living well. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had [...]
In his “Essays,” Michel de Montaigne rejects notions of virtue as a quasi-divine state and instead embraces Stoic and Epicurean notions of virtue as a sort of tranquility of mind and soul. A virtuous man restrains his natural vices and lives an orderly and moderate life. For the French nobleman and philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, [...]
Adam Smith, the father of the discipline we now refer to as economics, was a moral and political philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and contemporary and acquaintance of Edmund Burke. Long heralded as a proponent of self-regulating markets, limited government, and free-market “capitalism,” Smith is often invoked by proponents of corporate capitalism as an archetype [...]
Mary Shelley was perhaps the first to illuminate modernity’s insatiable appetite for temporal progress. Today humanity continues its quest to maximize its knowledge, not to attain truth, but in a bid to achieve a new age of heaven on earth, powered by the rule of applied science. “I agree Technology is per se neutral: but [...]