Willmoore Kendall’s support of (relative) free speech is an integral part of his view of the “deliberate sense of the community,” which in turn is informed by the “public truth,” which itself is the political expression of the particular American historical experience of transcendent revelation. “[B]ut a completely open society in which everyone does his [...]
John Stuart Mill may well serve as an invaluable ally in searching out the roots of our ancient Anglo-American order that guarantee liberty as it coexists with order, neither at the other’s expense. He has a great deal of compassion and insight we could benefit from immensely, and it would be to our own disadvantage [...]
“A people may prefer a free government but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out [...]
II The related problems of “the public orthodoxy” and “the open society” were major concerns of Willmoore Kendall throughout his professional career. In his reappraisal of John Locke in 1941, Kendall’s Locke emerged as an exponent of the public orthodoxy as expressed through the majority. As Kendall sees it, in Lockean thought, “In consenting to be a member [...]
Jonathan Chait burned up the Internet with his critique of so-called political correctness.[1] Among many responses, Amanda Taub’s stands out for its denial of Mr. Chait’s basic premise.[2] According to Ms. Taub: …there’s no such thing as “political correctness.” The term’s in wide use, certainly, but has no actual fixed or specific meaning. What defines [...]
Academic freedom permits the airing and defense of any and all views, but some views have come to be largely unacceptable in academia today. Since such views are not only socially unacceptable, but often discouraged or even prohibited as a matter of university policy, why should they not also be banned when they are articulated [...]
As long as there have been “libertarians,” there has been hero worship of John Stuart Mill. This Nineteenth Century utilitarian author, most famously of On Liberty, has been looked to as a kind of fount of holy writ for individualism. And Mill was an individualist. Unfortunately, he was not a supporter of liberty in any [...]
Modern political conservatism takes its origin in Edmund Burke’s insistence upon the rights of society and its historically formed groups such as family, neighborhood, guild and church against the “arbitrary power” of a political government. By common assent modern conservatism, as political philosophy, springs from Edmund Burke: chiefly from his Reflections on the Revolution in [...]
“By the time he was eight, he knew nearly everything the doctor of philosophy knows nowadays, to put the matter mildly; but what his intellectual training lacked was the higher imagination, and for that he groped inveighing all his life long. J.S. Mill became all head and no heart, in which character he represents Jeremy [...]