Author: kurto

10. Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (15 April 2024)

by kurto

Essays spanning literary criticism and political thought, insistently making the point that only recovering the origins of one’s ideas, so as to see the real arguments before they calcified, makes one a thoughtful analyst. Some of the things we hold true are so, some are not.

Modern science seeks to explain man by what is not man, not by the soul. It broke with the classics, Swift first noted in Gulliver’s Travels, when it could no longer reason but only slavishly follow process: humanity was sidelined for Cartesian rationalism. But a man is most what he is by result of what he does, by the character of his activity. Schiller thought modernity was characterized by abstract science and also unrefined passions, whereas a good man and conscientious citizen seeks for harmony. But the ‘accidents of life’ force men into customs which cause them to forget the whole. Harmony is not daily but transcendent.

Since Rousseau, overcoming society’s bourgeois has been seen as very nearly the whole problem of realizing true democracy and simultaneously achieving genuine ‘personality’. Rousseau studied the passions to balance them, not to govern them. Yet he sought to reproduce Platonic egalitarianism based on morality, not post-Machiavellian self-interest. He introduced sublimation of the will as a source of higher expression (e.g., the arts); Nietzsche coined the erm; Freud popularized it. In Emile, lessons are separated into layers where philosophy seeks for the whole. Only in the end, in winning Sophia, does the protagonist distinguish between inclination and will; morality is the struggle between these since nature is primary and authority comes from within. Thus balanced can man be free and moral.

The bourgeois as Rousseau popularized them stand between the naturally good and the moral public. Rousseau follows Montesquieu in seeing virtue as a passion (as against the ancients), in believing passion the real power of the soul, in seeing only passion as able to control passion. But Enlightenment sought to connect selfish passions to the rational, dependable civic ones, while Rousseau defended morality versus reason and denied the otherwise desired transition. Consequently while the ancients saw the freedom of the small community as the means to virtue, he made freedom the end. Willing the general will was a new kind of inclination: obedience is freedom! Rousseau looked to aristocratic Sparta and Geneva as models.

To summarize

    Natural Right and History

(pp. 241-242): Strauss thought Nietzsche wrong to assert rationalism was a line of inquiry unbroken from the ancients to contemporary science. The succession of philosophical developments obscures the core questions and their alternatives. To reject historicism is to seek to understand people as they themselves did, not to assert one can know more than the principals themselves.

On Aron: the Cold War was the political issue of the 20th century. The greatest sign of liberal decay was the savaging of the university by people who called themselves liberals. The tyrannies see bourgeois society as the enemy; communism says reason can’t be free, and must be replaced by theory; fascism wants to be replace reason with passion. Both undercut rationalism.

Kojeve saw Hegel as primarily concerned with self-knowledge, the ability for the philosopher to explain his doings. Hegel fulfilled the Platonic-Aristotelian goal of absolute wisdom – without such possibility, all knowledge, science, and philosophy itself is impossible. Thus the end of history, for only at the end can all be known. But if we lack final wisdom, then the matter is to understand alternatives.

Modern state-of-nature theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) agreed with Plato and Aristotle that nature is the permanent standard, but disagreed on what is natural. John Rawls is an updated utilitarian. Simplifying Hobbes and Locke, uninfluenced by Rousseau or Kant, focused on the satisfaction of desire but not morality let alone virtue, he thought pursuing contradictory social ends presented no problems, but evidenced freedom. Thus he was to intuit equality, dispensing with the question of whether equality is just.

Socrates saw the contest between philosophy and poetry stemming from religion, and more specifically the latter’s connection to fanaticism – a connection present in all artistic ‘cultures’. Culture implies opposition to commercial society (i.e., pursuits based on reason). It stems from the Platonic cave. During the Enlightenment art and religion became subservient to more amorphous culture. Bloom holds up Goethe as able to see the real problem of coming to terms with what is, not first reforming the world to one’s vision.

The

    Republic

attempts to find a regime in which philosophers are not ruled by hypocrites. Paraphrasing Aristotle, we begin with the things which are first to us, in order to reach what is first to nature. Aristotle saw the essence of happiness as virtue; life, liberty, and property are merely conditions favored by the moderns. In politics, teachings (i.e., consensus) reflect what is more powerful in the regime and in turn magnify the regime’s most dangerous tendencies. Yet there’s no reason to compromise public views which are conducive to the general good to accommodate the freedom of fanatical minorities.

The sociology of knowledge is a premise which accepts that which is to be investigated as established, that which is to be proven (by exegesis) as a given. A corollary: in what appears similar, we should look for distinctions.

Most university scientists are sub-theoretical technicians, and most research for commercial purposes. Only the money stops conflict from being apparent. More broadly, the modern university’s divided pursuits is the decisive intellectual phenomenon of the late 20th century (and counting?). The left sees the university as the means to addressing contemporary politics (or even forcing the issue). To assert students have the right to judge their teachers is to convert the school to a marketplace.

17. Klein and Pinos, ed., Burke (30 July 2024)

by kurto

A compilation of passages focused on the French Revolution, statesmanship, and neo-political thought. Burke estimated contemporary Britain (circa 1795) had 400,000 informed citizens, from among a population of 10 million, of whom 80,000 favored the French Revolution. The editors contend radical is natural to man, to be countered by training and education. Burke’s writings tend to confirm O’Brien’s view that he most of all opposed tyranny, that he changed his stance but never his ground. Of note:

• Revolution is the last thought (‘resource’) of the thoughtful
• Prejudice (learned inclination) is trusted and ready in an emergency
• England would never ‘call in an enemy to the substance of any systems to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its constitution’ (p. 45)
• The press naturally become demagogues against wealth and merit
• ‘Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of members but not for their punishment’ (p. 61)
• Plans benefit from observations of those whose understand is inferior, as a sanity check (p. 75)
• Revolutionary persecution unifies the opposite evils of intolerance and indifference – against all conscience. Moral sentiments, connected with ‘early prejudice’, cannot live long under nihilist regimes
• The foundation of government is not in theoretical rights of man (‘a confusion of judicial with civil principles’) but in convenience and nature – that is, either universal or local modification
• Men often mistakenly feel courage produces danger, rather than the obvious opposite
• When reason of state prohibits disclosure, silence is manly
• The possession of power discloses the true character of a man

3. O’Brien, Great Melody (21 Feb 2021)

by kurto

3. O’Brien, Great Melody (21 Feb)
Shunning understandings of Burke as the father of conservatism or primarily an exponent of natural law, O’Brien contends the guiding theme of the Anglo-Irishman’s political career is opposing tyranny and the abuse of power:

American colonies, Ireland, France, and India
Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it
– WB Yeats, the Sevens Sages

He agrees Burke changed his stance but not his ground: ‘One should distinguish between inconstancy and variation under circumstance. Liberty must work in conjunction with order’, Burke says in a detailed statement of political views (p. 441). Whenever there is an ‘obvious’ silence it’s traceable to his Irish liabilities; identification with Catholics emerges only very late, in the published letter to Hercules Langrishe.

Whiggish views of the late Georgian era remain prevalent, even if the methodology is suspect. Burke’s role in British and international politics was more significant than usually held, notably his analysis of George III’s court being more accurate than Namierites allow. Indeed, he ‘founded’ the Whig school of history with Thoughts on Present Discontents; O’Brien’s view is consistent with Mansfield’s finding that Burke established political parties. Namier saw Burke as the lead representative of the Whig tradition, which is better represented by Macaulay, Morley, and Trevelyan. Morley thought no one surpassed Burke in bringing philosophy to bear on statesmanship, ironic given his reputation for hysteria, and Namier’s mistake is believing the historian who sees the most recent / the latest has the best perspective: this may be so but does not entail authority to refute contemporary statements and records. To find Burke guilty of authoritarianism, as does Namier, one must ignore everything he ever said.

O’Brien treats Burke thematically, rather than chronologically.

    Ireland

: Grattan represented the Protestant Ascendancy, Burke surreptitiously the underground Catholic gentry, displaying lifelong interest in its culture. ‘Will no one stop this madman Grattan?’ (p. 243) – Burke was alarmed by independence for the Ascendancy, the Volunteers seeming to Catholics to represent mob violence. His father’s conversion was a wound that never healed; to his mother he owed a debt of honor that was never expatiated. He accepted Rome as a legitimate Christian institution, and closely identified with Trinity College Dublin. The Ascendancy correctly perceived Burke as a threat but couldn’t produce a smoking gun to alienate British Whigs. He shaped the Catholic Relief Bill of 1778, though did not advocate it; he lost Bristol because of evident sympathies which characterized every other important field of pursuit.

    America

: conciliation meant extending liberty throughout the empire. Once the fighting broke out, he fully sided with the colonists. As with the other three themes, the enemy is abuse of power. He likely drove the Rockingham administration’s repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke was concerned with American affairs by 1767, contra Namier, but the fragile alliance between Rockingham and Grenville (whom Burke disliked) effectively silenced him; when Grenville died in 1770, Burke (the driving force behind repeal of the Stamp Act) was no longer hostage to its author. Subsequently Fox was won over to the Rockinghams by Burke, who was prepared to follow him in the Commons. His major pronouncements on the Colonies comprise speeches on the Declaratory Act (1766), American taxation (1774), Conciliation with America (1775), and the address to the sheriffs of Bristol (1777). Those who were most anti-Catholic in Ireland and America were also most opposed to George III’s America policy, paradoxically for Burke. Further, Irish Volunteers were pro-American but anti-French, a problem once France swung behind the colonists. Burke spoke to English Whig towns, but not to the Ascendancy since he was a closet Jacobite. The Irish ferment around free trade in 1779 demonstrated the gulf between Grattan, unconcerned with Catholics, and Burke. Between Saratoga and Yorktown, Westminster’s struggles were essentially George III versus Burke, via the struggle for economic reform and the push for a second Rockingham ministry. In the course of negotiating the possibility of a North-Rockingham coalition, George III saw Burke a real advantage, ergo Burke didn’t need to prove his bona fides; from 1782 (Yorktown), George moves toward the character of a Whiggish constitutional monarch (contra Roberts).

    India

: In 1773 Burke turned down an opportunity to lead an inquiry into general amnesty for the East India Company – to whitewash, which would have produced personal benefits. However, he soon after gave a speech seeming to absolve Hastings and others in furtherance of the Rockingham line. He could not yet set the party’s tone. His real interests emerge in 1781, his fury demonstrating the injury of prior restraint. O’Brien allows for some defense of Hastings’ administration, while concluding Burke’s opposition to be principled. In supporting Fox’s India bill, Burke reveals his mind: ‘obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory’; ‘It is by bribing, not so often being bribed, that wicked politicians bring ruin on mankind’ (p. 348). George III ultimately saw the validity of Burke’s view; Pitt trapped the Foxite Whigs of public identification w opposition to East India, Burke didn’t care. Cornwallis, succeeding Hastings, concluded the project Burke commenced in 1781.

    France

: Price’s Revolutionary Society, established to celebrate 1688, emphasized the anti-Catholic aspects of the Revolution. Price was further an acolyte of Lord Shelburne, whom Burke thought had fomented the Gordon riots. Fox precipitated and insisted on the Whigs’ public split over France; Burke was trying not to run too far ahead of Portland and Fitzwilliam. When Pitt coopted the latter, Burke became superfluous. Burke understood fear of Jacobinism spreading to Ireland was paradoxically helpful to Catholic emancipation. Pitt calculated he would continue to support the government despite Fitzwilliams’ recall from Dublin, to have no choice but to support continued repression.
The French Revolution and Russian Revolution preceded Hitler in recasting society on the basis of theory. The exact nature of ideas is unimportant – the possibility of the mob seizing power is the essence; victims of the Terror were victims of rationalism. In an appendix of correspondence with the author, Irving Berlin is wrong to suggest Burke attacked the Enlightenment, or was reactionary (in Crooked Timber). Opposing the French Revolution as utopiam is far from reactionary, which Berlin concedes in correspondence. Nor was Burke a theoretical advocate of aristocracy, but more a defending of actually existing society.

NB: ‘Too much immersion in one’s profession, not enough in learning, relegates concentration to forms of business – not substance – because forms deal with ordinary matters’.
‘I cannot go that way to work. I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be’. (p. 321
‘Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everybody else’. (p. 387)
‘To innovate is not to reform’ (p.537)

16. Mahoney, Statesman as Thinker (13 August 2022)

by kurto

Holds up Cicero, Burke, Lincoln, Tocqueville, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel as exemplary statesmen, demonstrating excellence of vision and execution through contemporary turbulence. Courage, moderation (temperance and prudence), and magnamity (greatness of soul, according to classic or Christian ideals) in pursuit of justice are the essential attributes of those who would command practical reason in service of ordered liberty. Aristotle’s is the classic statement of a gentlemen-statesman, the opposite of Weber’s charismatic leader. Modern political thought and social science cannot discern the requisite qualities, believing in a false realism: in ascribing every action to naked power, the ability to assess motivation is forfeit and consequently to distinguish the statesman from the tyrant. The study of humanity includes legitimate uses of authority, Aron observed: Napoleon’s tyranny demonstrates greatness unchained from humility. The unbounded will seeks to reshape nature and society, but energy without wisdom is of little use.

Cicero: contending with Caesar, the Roman served as prototype in exemplifying foresight via reflection not ambition or will.

Burke: Reason is to be tested against practical modifications; theory alone will fail: prudence needs principle as much as principle prudence. ‘Ingratitude is the first of revolutionary virtues’ (p. 40)

Tocqueville: a deterministic fatalism (‘democratic history’) cannot illustrate the role of greats in history.

Churchill: Berlin’s Mr. Churchill in 1940 is the consummate statement.

De Gaulle: depreciated ‘Nietzschean disdain’ for the limits of human experience, common sense, law, seeing instead the need for balance, what is possible, and mesure. The Maginot line was morally corrupt – effete. Where Aristotle’s magnamity countenances hauteur, de Gaulle’s great man was Christian.

Havel: the Czech’s genius was to identify and surmount the ideological traits of post-totalitarian (post Leninist-Stalinist) regime, no longer dependent on mass violence yet still repressive.

Reagan and Thatcher receive honorable mentions as conviction politicians.

13. McLauchlan, Short History of New Zealand (23 May 2024)

by kurto

Sketches pre-European anthropology and sociopolitics over 1840-2015, touting the country’s egalitarian mores without connecting them to economic dirigisme. Following imperial Britain’s 1835 recognition of Maori sovereignty, the Treaty of Waitangi was hurriedly oversold and then broadly ignored, precipitating struggle for farmland as well as cultural clashes. Frontier fighting in the 1850s and 60s, by which time whites were in the majority, culminated in British confiscation of land – rather in the Maori tradition of warfare. Following a gold rush, Dunedin was the economic capital; however, by 1900 the balance of residents were on the north island (with most Maori in rural areas). The urban-rural political divide emerged in the 1880s; the economic template, spanning 1890-1960, turned on pastoral exports (wool, meat, dairy), mostly to England. Like Australia, the universal franchise and the welfare state arrived early, cemented by Michael Savage’s 1938 Social Security Act. Postwar unionism, highlighted by dockworker and neo-communist strikes in 1951, brought the National Party back into contention. Parliament became unicameral in 1949, making legislation easy to pass. Social strife resurfaced in the 1960s, often around rugby competition with apartheid South Africa. Labor-led reform came in the 1980s, though discussion of ‘Rogernomics’ is slender. By late 20th century, three-quarters of Maori had moved to the towns, mostly in the north island. To a degree, contemporary economic stability owed not only to diversification of exports but also Australian-owned banking. Why did New Zealand decline federation with Australia? Aside from wartime alliance, what were New Zealand’s views of sovereignty prior to the shock of England’s joining the EEC? The author rushes to demonstrate anti-racist sensibilities but then spends more time of conservative Pakeha culture (e.g., prohibition and liquor laws), not even treating the phenomenon of the Maori Party.

9. Stern, Varieties of History (1 April 2024)

by kurto

Samples leading views of historiography over 1750-1950. In the 19th century, history played a polemical role similar to ideology in the 20th. This edition is willing to lend credence to ‘socialist history’ and demonstrates the mid-20th century’s fascination with Freud. Historicism is used in various ways, though generally negative; surprisingly, Butterfield’s Whiggish history is omitted. The profession has sometimes ruled out certain views, or at least reached consensus, but more typically moves from one waystation to the next – which may help explain the timebound views of historicism. The most persuasive, enduring approaches are those of Ranke (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’; what actually happened, irrespective of the author), Meinecke, Trevelyan, and perhaps Barzun. Of note:
• Ranke: history should ascend from observing particulars to a universal view of events, knowledge of objective existence. It will focus on general concepts where nations have played an active role. ‘In power there appears a spiritual substance, an original genius, which has a life of its own, fulfills conditions peculiar to itself’. ‘We work in two directions: investigate the effective factors in historical events and understand their universal relationship’
• Trevelyan: no historical event can be so isolated as to deduce from it general laws. The ideals of any epoch are insufficient for a general way of life. There are three distinct functions: the scientific (gather factors, in sufficient evidence), the imaginative (recreate, guess, generalize), and the literary (restore to life; attract and educate). Great history is accessible to, and may be requisite, to a reading public of pronounced character. The truth is black and white – ‘in patches’
• Meinecke: the dispute between political and cultural history arises because neither is clear on the relationship between values and cause; the state may be central (a la Hegel), but not necessarily the highest, being subordinate to the spiritual or moral; that there are copious state records do not make it the leading institution
• Coulanges: what ideas or customs hold sway over individuals wills so as to make them happy? Institutions are to be studied over time
• Barzun: cultural history is not history of ideas – the former turns not on logic or scientific advance. Intellectual history is geometric, whereas cultural history requires Pascal’s espirit de finesse.
• Macaulay: the perfect historian has the imagination to fuel narrative, the discipline to preserve the integrity of his materials. He exhibits the character of the subject’s age. History does not have laws of progression but of method
• Holborn: the objective point of view paradoxically relies on the scholar’s subjective approach. Stern adds the most one can aspire to is ethical consideration of personal views and fidelity to truth (knowledge)
• Namier: when properly studied, what happened is specific knowledge; whereas how things do not happen should be intuitive – wisdom does not come from remembered events (which are ‘clutter’)
• Young: ‘go on reading until you hear people speaking’
• Thierry: in history simple exposition is safest, elaborate logic obscures truth
• Acton: overemphasis on analysis returns to synthesis (narrative)
• Mommsen: the historian is not born but trained, not educated but self-taught
• Orwell (echoing Macaulay and Trevelyan): history promotes a sense of possibility and liberty that tyrants must suppress
NB: Thierry – ‘Indeed, if it is merely a misfortune to suffer oppression imposed by the force of circumstances, it is shameful to display servility.

11. McMillan, Modern France 1880 – 2002 (28 April 2024)

by kurto

A disappointing collection of thematic overviews that fails to get at France’s approach to the great sociopolitical questions. The authors neither ground core problems nor suggest departures, but frequently trend toward sociology as well as left-liberal consensus circa 2000; the essays ignore Maastricht, fairly enough for a history but illogical in light of attacks on right-wing ‘identitarianism’.
• The long-term goal of the Third Republic was to build the state for plutocrats as well as bourgeois, never mind the Dreyfus affair’s ruptures. But radical democrats and emergent socialists found no common ground: democratic (i.e., liberal) socialism was ‘impossible’
• Fin-de-siecle governmental persecution of Catholics, led by Rousseau-Waldeck over 1899-1902, parallels Bismarck’s earlier efforts: the separation of 1904, undoing Napoleonic concordat, exposed the church’s dependency on the state. Despite the hostility, many clergy fought for France in World War I, earning some respite; in the early Fifth Republic, de Gaulle and other ministers again brought Catholics to the fore; there is no discussion of Muslim immigration
• France’s descent over 1815-1945 stems from demographic decline – there is no linkage to the Catholic plight – especially after Germany’s 1870 unification. By 1910, France was the world’s leading immigrant country, attracting Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and French colonials to work at large, industrial firms. Traditionally rural France, which contacted the outside world via the bicycle (presaging the Tour de France), finally succumbed in the postwar era to economic modernization – though small farms persisted, protected by the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, and the state remains the country’s largest employer
• Only after 1936 did France subordinate her foreign policy to Britain, and in the postwar era much her impulse has been to restore independence and grandeur
• In addressing the French Communist party as well as ‘committed’ intellectuals (said to ‘think in German’), the authors allude to obvious dead-ends but adduce no evidence of remorse. However, the Fourth Republic collapsed because it was designed to counter the extinct Communist threat; Algeria mattered mainly to the political classes; the Fifth Republic minimized the influence of the Fourth’s ‘notables’, for example by referenda. Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, succeeding the SFIO (Section francaise de l’Internationale ouvriere), wisely limit doctrinaire politics, mimicking the more flexible right, and so succeeding in 1981
NB: Barres: intellectuals are those who believe society is founded on logic

8. Rogachevsky and Zigler, Israel’s Declaration of Independence (20 March 2024)

by kurto

Natural rights are surprisingly evident in the Israeli charter, drawn by laborite Zionists; in turn, the Israeli’s contemporary judiciary claims sole competency to interpret the nation’s ‘credo’ from the Declaration, the country having no constitution but only Basic Laws. Hurriedly drafted amid British departure and Arab warfare, the document settled on rights inhering in individuals, not emanating from the state, through David Ben-Gurion’s force of influence.

After the Zionist Action Committee dissolved itself into Moetzet Ha’Am (a People’s Council of 13), Ben-Gurion sought to declare statehood such that Jews would be ‘masters of their own fate’. Mordechai Beham’s initial version combined Anglo-American political thought, as evidenced in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, with Jewish tradition as evidenced in the Torah, entailing fairness, supremacy of reason, the spiritual above material (contra Zionism), and the ethical above the practical. The community’s centuries-long exile maintained fidelity to the this approach, but natural rights were a notable innovation for no signer of the Declaration was born in western Europe or the Anglosphere.

Poorly received, these views were pared back in subsequent versions. Labor Zionism, which holds to the state’s preeminent authority (and origination of rights), progress through material gain, and equality of outcomes, came to the fore. These chimed with Roosevelt’s four freedoms and the new UN charter. It was also important to repudiate the UK’s governance (notably its white paper restricting Jewish immigration (‘ingathering’) – and to enshrine a nebulous democracy. Herschel Lauterpacht’s draft, drawing on nascent, postwar views of international law ,sought to align with UN resolution 181, which envisioned the dual-state solution as well as tests for sovereign capability and sufficiency. Moshe Shertok, a Washington DC lobbyist, sought for American support, which George Marshall opposed for fear of angering Arabs but Harry Truman overrode (albeit on the basis of UN boundaries of November 1947).

Ben-Gurion sought an Israeli state above all: his goals were sovereignty, a Jewish state, and principles of political right. Holding that founding implies disregard for status quo, he surpassed fractious colleagues, for example eschewing the declaration of boundaries as artificially limiting. He located the right to sovereignty in Israel itself, established by its ‘universal significant’ of the Torah, the ‘book of books’. He (unintentionally?) followed Blackstone in viewing rights as pre-existing the state; the state is to preserve these rights. Also, his state was to be more Jewish than democratic.

Menachem Begin’s Revisionist underground came in to ally with Ben-Gurion: more opposed to mandatory rule, he too sought a Jewish state, but was more comfortable with Anglo-American rights.

It’s ironic that the Anglosphere was largely ignored at the height of its postwar influence. In the continuing lack of a constitution, the Supreme Court, which has built up ‘a potent arsenal of normative language to interpret practices (p. 245).

NB: Jefferson’s draft of the American Declaration located rights in mankind’s equal creation, not in the Creator.

7. Scruton, England: An Elegy (2 March 2024)

by kurto

England’s 20th-century decline owes to abandoning the wisdom of culture and custom derived from the countryside, common law, and the softening of power into authority. Classical Albion was a society of people desiring of privacy who could nonetheless be relied upon to act benevolently – strangers but never foes. Governed not from above (i.e., by class) but within (self-regulating order but around shared experience and compromise), it collapsed after World II not through antiquated education and honor but because English politics and law work only in English society, through reason not rationality and compromise. Urban development, homogeneity, and Continental rationality (e.g., Roman law and EU promulgations) broke the spell of enchantment.

Law and government:
Common law developed along the lines of Kant’s view that the moral law known to all rational beings, even if not all could explain it. The point was to do justice in the individual case, regardless of interests of power or cohesive rationality. Legal proceedings were primarily discovery, not invention: what was to be discovered is the solution to the case, not the law of the land. The object was not to exercise power over people but to give people relief from abusive power.
Rights were ancient prerogatives of the people, effected by custom not granted by government. Individuals possessed rights only because they were also burdened by duties, in contrast with European positive rights granted by government. Trusteeship in law (Burke’s partnership), along with trial by jury (of peers) and the common law itself, were characteristic features enabling disinterested husbandry of shared assets particularly over time.

The English cared less for the origins of the monarch than monarch’s commitment to upholding the law of the country; Protestantism was merely an exponent of lawfulness and custom. Whereas the Local Government act of 1888 eroded local interests and identity, while centralizing and corrupting authority.

When confronting power, the English questioned whatever and whenever no authority was evident, for possessing power does not entitle or recommend its exercise. England had never suffered Weber’s transition from traditional to legal-rational forms of authority. The attitude toward officialdom was: it it’s needs doing, you yourself should. So long as government service is an honor, it will attract the best minds; but it is merely a well-paid lifestyle, it degrades to power.
Imperialism’s worst crimes were committed against the Irish, during the Interregnum when politics was self-righteous, not compromising. But though the English emerged from World War II morally exhausted, no longer willing to cultivate its inheritance – to bear duties as well as rights – and to stave off its enervating critics, it didn’t think to compare its record with its Continental peers or previous empires. As Tocqueville observed, revolutionary sentiment is not borne of oppression but weakness of the old order.

The harmonization of law discovered not promulgated, the monarch as a corporation sole representing the people, and a religion tenuous but uniting was a settlement, an enchantment – Burke’s making the country lovely to its inhabitants. The key to government is not democracy but representation of the people’s interests, which requires compromise as well as solutions across generations; the political system must intend to amplify authority while restricting power.

Society and culture:
Hume thought the mind comprised of sensations, and the soul an illusion. If so, then a propos of Thatcher, so too must society be a collection of individuals.
English honor could be extended throughout society because the trust of behaving rightly did not require intimacy – it worked among strangers – and the test of virtue was in moments of real difficulty or danger, or when no one was looking. England did not turn on Mediterranean honor and kinship but honesty, fair play, and rule of law. The primary objective in morality is to act rightly in the circumstance, not to expound the principles which color one’s view of right, even / especially when principles are elusive or obscure. This was Austen’s genius to show. The gentleman was defined by manners, culture, virtue, aloofness but independent of lineage and wealth; and could be trusted to behave rightly without reducing the distance between him and you. Class worked to advance the body politic’s social objectives and aspirations. Amongst the working class, society was not a prison but a maze potentially leading to the way out. Disquiet over immigration is not ipso facto racism but the loss of a sense of home, disrupted to what end? When your primary loyalty is locality, EU or global sovereignty acts to create a crisis of identity.
Shakespeare presented England as enchanted by ethics, justice, law, authority; and always the ideal was presented as the possibility of restoration. England simultaneously believed the sacred to be a human construct, and that some things really are sacred.

The Anglican Church was a settlement, an attempt at peace, molding Christian belief to English idiosyncrasies, thereby enabling the binding of strangers. Once synthesis was achieved, doctrine became a social benefit, a transmitter of shared ethics. The people became a corporate person. Religion was a close ally of law, government, and social institutions. Contra Linda Colley, the English understood Protestantism in terms of nationality, not nationality in terms of Protestantism.
English art and literature were premised on place, demonstrating internalization of mystified (sacralized) topography. Burke in Sublime: nature is mysterious, is internalized by imagination (not rationally deducted). (Hedges were not total enclosures but permitted continuance of footpaths.) Where the French were more concerned with rural privations than fulfillments and contentments, the English gentlemen sought not to spend their money in London but in their country seats. The countryside’s decline reduced his stature, as did the abolition of hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

English money was not rational and meant to be added, but traditional and meant to be divided, shared. Imperial and metric diction is evidence of reasonable versus rational; the English system was the product of what works in life.

English empiricism rejected the need to rationalize everything – reason can never explain morality, politics, religion, and so on a priori. Negotiation, compromise, deference to tradition are valid, helpful contributors, the latter often likely to contain the essence of things. Empiricist philosophy, allied to common law reasoning (discovery of the ancient and the essential) and parliamentary government, were expressed in the ‘concrete vocabulary and compromising syntax’ of the language.
(Relevance in education is chimerical: who can guess the student’s interests in 10, 20, 40 years? So the standard is excellent and extent of current knowledge.)

What was the apex of Scruton’s England? Were its core elements synchronized or did they separately peak? Probably he would have chosen somewhere between the Georgian and early mid Victorian eras; although Brexit would likely have been welcome. Corelli Barnett emerges as Scruton’s principal opponent for misdiagnosing the cause of England’s decline.