My Theory of the Brontosaurus

So my only compunction, self doubt, reasonable or not, is Goldberg's liberal fascism thesis: popular sovereignty, from the bottom up, brings all of society within the political; the law as instrumentality, humanity (re)shaping itself. Thus liberalism is responsible for the bloodletting of the 20th c. If we hadnt invented politics (as opposed to law and rule as command) none of this would have happened. As argued, I dont think you can get non slavery without universal suffrage, but that may not hold; and you might get universal suffrage and non slavery but define non slavery as self ownership, and still tilt the polity conservative. But that doesnt break the universal suffrage and fascism link. Anyhoo, I think universal suffrage is definitely a counter to nationalism, which is the root of fascism, what Foucault calls governmentality. Nationalism is no necessary friend of a hierarchical conservatism, though the German upper class chose Hitler over communism (naturally enough). Patriotism is always in lieu of your rights.

We have a party that peddles fear and a party that fears the other party.

Sexuality is the focus of conservatives because it is where law, if not from God, fails: an 'act' that is neither legal nor illegal; where voluntarity must find its root?

Is there a necessary connection between sexuality and euthanasia? The separation of death and law, of self and body (ownership), suggest it? Or the opposite, that the mistaken liberalism of self ownership requires it?

Liberal democracy means the human never recovers itself, as it does in totalitarianisms. And thence nature is allowed to survive us.

Consent is the absence of established religion.

No one is more vigilant against separatists than a Calvinist. The structure of the Calvinist church is meant to ensure that it controls society, to replace the power lost with the Catholic structure. That the political could exceed the religion, could comprise multiple religions, that religion could be a matter of conscience, undirected from without: these are the heresies Calvin opposes? This effort must have seemed a temptation to disobedience to Luther?

The tories wanted a king, lest the law be made by man; it shouldnt have mattered what the religion of the king was. But it did matter. To say his religion didnt matter was to make kingship an office, precisely what they wanted to deny? If not eius religio, no king? Ie, no bishops no king, for bishops preclude the privacy of religion. Religious plurality is conscience, and conscience is free of law (no one, vs the one of the king's third person).

The New Criterion had a symposium on the new statism. I should read it, but I cant bear it. The hysteria seems in direct proportion to the lack of anything to stand for. Let's say the heritage is the anti govt rhetoric of the conservative side (originally just anti federal? the neocons arent democratic but they arent anti federal either), taken to the extreme: but these are not anarchists. This goes back to the liberal-fascism thesis. Can they oppose govt as such and still retain democracy? They want to shrink govt to executive, and have the laws be taken for granted? But the laws must always be taken for granted--this is the error of liberalism that overplayed the court, opened itself to the charges of being anti democratic and elitist? (The question of where to draw the line between what I need to act freely as an individual per the meta govt'l/democratic dimension, and my subjection to the majority's rule.) The true libertarian claim, again, govt cannot be limited to non interference without creating obligation: the other who interferes is the other who commands. What I'm trying to do is to come up a single formulation that addresses both sides, and maybe it would be to phrase it as an existential problem: to acknowledge the other (murder or enslavement being the foreclosure of that possibility) which means hearing his call to decision, ie for self or for other.

NB that the revolutions of the 17c were driven by the gentry: not sure what this means, either the word or the argument. But it would make sense to see a continuum going back to magna carta: dispersion of power from the center, not to the people but to the land holding class. TR makes them sound progressive, but I dont think they intended to end up creating a democracy. The king may be the true modernizer, or the statist, depending on your point of view. That William will be associated with the formation of the Bank suggests that the state's interests are not those of the landed class. As the king lives beyond his means, he becomes more dependent on parliament, and less of a king, more of a govt. He pulls the polity out of aristocracy, while sacrificing himself. Penn was being astute in playing the king against parliament for progressive ends, though it put the king at odds with his grandfather's dictum.

The king is created in war? Without it, he has no purpose, no difference (in kind) from his allies or barons? No right against a magna carta? Yet it is war that drives his dependence on parliament--but popular, nationalistic war? As war requires men and money and less kingly leadership? War will require nationalism and economic motives, or the freedom of manoeuver of the French king's abolutism. It will be the policy of imperial whigs, not landed tories, who want the standing armies dispersed?

Kant said purposiveness without purpose: you cant get purposiveness without technique. Our art is purposeless but only trivial.

I'm wondering if it's possible to capture, within a time, its actual movements; ie, to distinguish the side effect from the cause, the triviality from the important change. As a first pass, what if we are--we? are? ie not just as a theme, but as a reality?--coming to grips with the fact that our technological power has surpassed us? Think of Kateb on extinction, or Schledjahl on narcissism resulting from the possibility of nuclear war; think of McKibben on the end of nature after global warming; think of mind as information, and that we all work with machines we dont understand; of TV, also mysterious but omnipresent; of reliance on medicine and its ultimate failure. Political apathy looks like a refusal to be deceived. A fervent theism all the more belated. We have to go back to Heidegger to find what it means to lose being, and then to Derrida and Midgely to live with it? Or to Em/Th?

Technology is our control over our environment; what happens when it becomes the environment? McKibben thought we lost a romantic sense of nature, but we also lose control of our technology.

What runs beneath the stupidity of our political discourse of balance, of tactic and insider knowledge? Our "expert" interpretation of politics instead of politics, ie issues and policy? The interpenetration of media and govt for the mutual infantilization of both?

Anglicanism simply a rejection of petrine claim, that any one bishop surpasses the others? Henry taking back what is Caesar's leaves the church in its true apostolic succession?

Do I live in the same country as the people who think they need guns, lots of guns? What are they afraid of?

The conservative's America is so small, so incurious and fearful.

Equality is the protection of conscience. Liberty makes no allowance for it. Universal suffrage is the denial of sovereignty and legitimacy, the separation of govt and ground, of law and death. Liberty is content to share power; it seeks for each to have power over himself, and that no other has power over him. Yet can someone sell himself?

Let's start over, in a bipartisan spirit. Let's assume an irreducible choice between equality and liberty, and that American conservatism is committed to liberty. The first problem is that I dont trust them; I think they are on a slippery slope to authoritarianism. Certainly someone who identifies his christianity with a political goal cannot be trusted with another's liberty. On the other hand, I can see the distinction between acts and persons as a ground for not recognizing gay rights; I think it falls given the innateness of gayness, but I can at least see the hypothesis (the innateness question is the question of the question begging of assuming gayness doesnt occur naturally). The bigger question is whether liberalism is committed to a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. I may have given up too much ground here heretofore; that totalitarianism is a form of humanism is I think right. That it fits a nationalism and militarism foreign to liberalism is also I think correct. Nationalism would be a solution to the problem of liberalism: recuperating the citizens death, if not for the law, for the nation. NB also that German nationalism is a wounded, compensatory nationalism. Nationalism in response to a sense of nationalism denied. Nationalism presumes the humiliation, to itself, it seeks to expiate. Is Japan parallel? Contemporary China, Russia and Iran seem so. The marxist emphasis on the discovery of economics as the key to all else and the communist-- revolutionary--emphasis on having all power and--concommitent?--willingness to lie (as if the rest of the world wouldnt know?) must be a different development from nationalism. Though it is arguable that Stalin's Russia was in essence a nationalist project, ie the great patriotic war. Indeed, neither he nor Hitler may be unique phenomena given the destiny of the countries to destroy each other--as the teleology of their (own) nationalisms.

See how easily I get distracted? My premise is that the "reasonable conservative" will begin with Berlin's two concepts of liberty. Both Berlin and Oakshott are terrific writers and students of Burke, but Berlin is easier to use in an American context (Americans dont believe in epistemology).

That capitalism created the possibility of a conservatism not based in land ownership and social hierarchy; the main goal of which would be to limit redistribution as much as possible, and would be aided in this by appeal to the maximization of economic benefit, wealth generation. A rising tide lifts all boats. But this is a latter day development. The opposition would center on a labor movement, fighting a systematic suppression of wages, from paper money to collective bargaining. Without unions, does labor have a price? Is there a market in labor if any one worker can be replaced with any other, if labor itself is not deniable, via the strike eg? Maybe that applies to unskilled labor? Whether labor is political because a bare minimum must be maintained, or because, like non slavery, labor is a political effect, it is the form of political opposition under capitalism. If wages are inflationary because any increase is offset by a rise in prices, paid by the consumers/workers, is Friedman saying that "anticipation" of that effect is what causes inflation to accelerate? The liberal program, in essence, is to balance out the inequalities of the economy with some universal guarantees?

The satirist doesnt present his own opinion; he doesnt need one; he is not a democrat. He is correcting error, not defending it. Exposing error without discerning the truth?

What would liberty without equality look like, best case scenario? Not just with achieved liberty (Burkean) and the laws the majority considers 'natural', but liberty in principle. Would a night watchman state, by the dynamism and wealth generation and voluntarity of capitalism, make equality unnecessary? Bracket prophylactic arguments, that power corrupts etc. Assume we could keep govt at bay without politics, without universal suffrage and the vigilance of political involvement. There is no closure onto the third person, on theism or monarchy. And everybody is happy enough with the opportunities the economy provides. Rational forethought would dictate infra structure investments, including education? Technological shocks and pricing bubbles are small or non existent. The less govt does, the more free you are; you are without command. You are free of all others, and your only law is your own desire.

NB: when we speak of liberty, do we mean anything more than no redistribution? That none of my money should go to anyone else?

An ethic of voluntarity, vs. one of law and command, doesnt (cannot) make life itself an end, though it does separate death and law. What it does do is make it untenable to bring the other into yourself via "law": it makes the political power untenable (unheld). Our only purpose, the only purpose of (our) govt, is the other.

Well, we each could have our religious purposes, and our families. We have no need of a public purpose.


Hypothetical: the most extreme, complete formulation of libertarianism I can imagine: What is voluntary must be allowed; what is not voluntary is not permitted. (I know: voluntarity is the law of no law but this law. But I think this answers to a deep American conviction, govt only against govt.) With exception for children, not yet capable of voluntarity? With no plan for treatment of property/inheritance? (Assumption that all property is result of labor.) If you frame it as not being subject to another, there is no bar on helping those in need, who cannot subject anyone. If you ask "why" (which you wouldnt, because the whole point is for consent for this to be assumable) voluntarity is the basis and goal you must think about self and other. There is no voluntarity in the for-self. Think of the anatomical distinction between involuntary and voluntary. (The other is the only end, and I do not own myself.) NB that what is at issue is, always, executive power; (to change the laws is another question? in a liberal situation, but we are talking about a radical libertarianism). The denial of the executive power to any group, however predominant, is the liberal challenge. Voluntarity is impregnable under the presumption that we want the minimal coercion possible. Yet, again, the point is that there is any presumption at all. There are other conclusions to be drawn from the denial of coercion. Libertarians dont ask the question, and dont see the presumption. That blindness leads to the unreliability of their 'non' judgment. We disallow coercion out of universality: that's the diremption, that all we know of universality is non coercion. You cannot be enslaved to one without power. You cannot choose someone's death, in preference to your own life/comfort--ie any domination of another is to grab hold of his death, and that is what abolition of the involuntary precludes. Therefore even under a govt of voluntarity you have to provide for those in need. The symmetry is about death: no individual can inflict death, and the state must not allow it, ie supply the difference? If the state is no one it is, therefore, everyone? If the state doesnt allow the for self it demands the for other? NB that the libertarian regime requires no democracy; it's laws, or lack thereof, are predictable. This is the very mistake of no law for law. The requirement for democracy is what the libertarian doesnt allow, what he doesnt see as the implication or corollary of the non law that underlies non coercion. It is this universal suffrage that creates the demand for the for other. Simple lack of law need not underwrite libertarianism; it could justify tyranny. The forebearance of law is the gift of universal suffrage.


If secularism is a religion there is no freedom of religion, so are you prepared to fight?

In the Times Gail Collins notes that the right wants to reopen the civil war. This is not news however, since the appeal to states rights goes back, purely coincidentally, to the civil rights era and was endorsed by Goldwater (if not written by him) in the Conscience of a Conservative. It is interesting that Lincoln was accused of conflating the constitution with the declaration, and now the states rights crowd wants to do the same. But then we have an anti federalist Federalist Society. A conservative commentator was recently slapped for suggesting, via quote of Jefferson, that Obama's blood be let to fertilize our liberty, but perhaps we really do never settle any question forever. We could just dissolve the federal govt. That would make defense problematic, but would have support from both sides (recall those maps emailed after the 04 election showing the United States of Canada and Dumbfuckistan/Jesusland). Indeed, I see no reason to oppose the secession of the confederacy today; there is no economic motive, and no implication in slavery to worry about. So the question is whether the (real) Federalists were actually wrong; they bet that a large country could maintain a democracy, that people living a thousand miles apart would have nothing in common and, therefore, meet in govt as abstracted and disinterested individuals. This is the point of Federalist 10, the argument that faction could not survive in a large polity. But maybe the polity itself cannot survive, cannot maintain the interest and commitment of its citizens if they must be so deracinated. Sandel is a better political philosopher than Madison.

What is the alternative to statism, monarchy? Liberalism is specifically opposed to the state, engaged with the state.

We have a conservatism that opposes not just macro economics but the federal govt, ie the United States. If they tolerate the constitution, it is one that doesnt accomodate a new deal, or a federal income tax. Lochner would be reinstituted. Would the 14th be erased as well?  If the founders can be christianized we can rest in them, ie recover them, their intent, and thus have no need of intent of our own.

Fascism the last refuge of anthropocentrism? That our problems are caused by other people, that differences between people matter?

Have we reached the point--long ago?--when conservatism is no longer a difference of opinion but an alternate reality? Eurabia, no Darwin or geology, states rights verging into rejection of the constitution...

Perhaps the lack of investment in infrastructure wont matter, as the car becomes obsolete for lack of fuel. But our lack of trains would then feudalize our economy. Which would match up with a feudal favor for superstition vs. science.

Just read a Tale of the Tub for the first time, and it really is, as he says in the conclusion, about nothing. The endlessness about dedications and prefaces, the framing device of the tub between leviathan and the commonwealth, the conceit of the moderns: all writing, no meaning. Modernity is the birth of writing, qua nothing, ie critics? My favorite part is the identity of happiness and deception. But it's all there, the faux science explanations of humanity, up to the mind as effect of bodily functions, the egotism of philosophers...The darkest must be the deepest.

Renaissance begins with recovery of rhetoric, and ends in Enlightenment effort to get outside of language, in order to possess reason.

Is a movie shot in one take absolutely formal or absolutely non formal?

The liberal believes equality is the true liberty. This means that govt must be engaged (in) in order to be overcome.  This seemed clearer when I was waiting to cross the street. The difference between sharing power and no power? That equality is the political.

The difference between an encyclopedia and a summa is that a summa is quotations from authorities and the authors of an encyclopedia presume to (re)discover everything for themselves? The medieval is not textual, but it does conform to text, it is such that it allows itself to be ruled by text? In that situation there can be no philosophy, because no consciousness of language?

Skepticism is not of whether the world is but of whether our representations of it are accurate? Not about rock kicking?

Need to revisit literary history, development of literature as profession and canon with its own history. Emergence of vernacular. Of the concept of literature. Of the academic discipline.

That parliament under William is addressing moral issues is evidence of secularization? Of emergence of secular culture?

Did Elizabeth weaken the monarchy by depending on the idea of England, so the Stuarts cant act in concert with European allies and expect parliament to do their bidding? James 1 had idea of Great Britain and no interest in war, but his sons and grandsons had an expectation of deference that was already too late?  As France rises throughout the century they are more enamoured and England more appalled.

We can trace anti catholicism from the marian martyrs to the contract on Elizabeth through the failure of the Spanish Armada and the Gun powder plot to the Popish plot: ie inseparable from English national sovereignty. Which makes sense since that was the impetus for Henry to break with the church, whether he understood the implications or not.

Henry reformed England because he didnt have a son; James 2 tried to recatholicize it because he did.

Tories are fighting against the king becoming an office?

NB that parliament begins, and thinks of its liberties as, gifts of the king. The king's oath is to preserve what other kings have conceded. Parliament has no power of its own. Power is divested by the king. There is no such thing as no power, as that which escapes power, ie conscience. (At some point the defiance of martyrs begins to seem a crack in the confidence of authority, rather than insanity or possession?)

Again, my property cannot be taken for another, per the definition of property, unless I give it, as I do in consenting to universal suffrage. Consent is not to law but to gift? And this meta govt--democracy--always comes after? Is not, therefore, a new basis, a revolutionary re-beginning? Equality is not a ground--this is the mistake of communism, ignoring the diremption (thus Marx misreads Hegel?), cf. Williams.

If the tea parties believe in lower taxes and more defense, like the GOP, but dont believe the GOP will do anything for them, they are led into paranoia? Democrats against govt itself, against themselves: always short circuiting themselves. Any govt is other, usurpation and betrayal. They cannot therefore achieve self govt, even as that is the demand that they make against the current govt. Honestly, I cant see the deficit being cause for concern now and not under RR or George 2; if there is a sudden perception that the govt is out of control, how is that not related to the color of the president's skin?

Think of satire as intimacy? As being able to fool the true believer into thinking you agree with him? What then is the difference? How have you exposed him by duplication? Is the freedom not political, freedom of press or conscience, but of technology, of the press more literally? The duplication of the message allows the mocking of the message? Where there is not command but argument, ie a public space, there is, necessarily, duplication, ie media, and therefore the potential for a duplication that is not just a duplication.  

Locke's letter is more difficult to parse than I remembered. It is overarched by the claim that being tolerant is being a good christian, but this is more than cruelty is unchristian. There is a clear concept of conscience as that which is not subject to force. Further, that force is the dominion of the "magistrate", as the polity is formed to create a strong executive for punishment and deterrence. Since faith is belief, and not authority, there is no reason for the faithful to seek power on behalf of faith, they must do so for its own sake. And then this point returns at the end as the divisiveness of sects is ascribed to their oppression and not their ideas. The solution to a political problem--sedition--is political, ie to end the misuse of political power. The magistrate has no religious authority--a man like any other--and therefore his church is not preferred; but, more importantly, no church can take on the authority of the magistrate (as catholics are always scheming to do).

Can we hypothesize that as the judgment is delayed the reform of the world seems more urgent--say rather, the reform of the individual within the world? Locke understands that there will be a judgment day, but seems more concerned with the fate of individuals, as if they will be judged individually, as they die, leaving this world intact.

The privacy of belief is the same as (evidenced by?) the correction of your own life. Sola fide turns out to be the same as works? Is there a structural dynamic by which faith, separated from orthodoxy, ie Calvin's presbytery, becomes sincerity, and sincerity demands living as you believe? To be sincere is to be faithful to yourself. The opposite of that would be to follow another; the distinction of self/other is what replaces orthodoxy. Faith is your answer to God, not to man. Orthodoxy is what man demands of man (for power in this world, not salvation in the next). This line does vitiate truth: what is truth? what I believe. Locke doesnt actually have ground for his exclusion of the atheist.

Ingenious, not that magistrate has no authority over the soul, but that religious authority is a cover for political power. The less power churches have, the greater distinction between church and state, the more the church is but one association among all the associations within the polity (the market eg), the more true religion is assured. Because true religion is true belief, in the sense of my own belief, not imposed or pretended, it can only occur in the absense of political control. Christianity is vindicated not because it dictates loving kindness, but because oppression in the name of religion is proved to be its opposite. But this Christianity is reduced to religion. And religion is what is tolerated ("Promises, covenants and oaths, which are bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist...those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge their privilege of a toleration.") 'True' faith is true 'faith'; judged not by the content, but by the faith. This is the copernican revolution in theology. It can occur only in a polity where the separation of church and state is established. It is imperative that every man be free to find his salvation; if not found, but forced, he is damned. It is religion that drives this version of social contract.

He recognizes that political deformation is the result of the denial of conscience, but he founds his polity on consent to enforcement; there is no question about what the law should be. There is no toleration for the atheist. The tautology of 'faith' conceals the antinomian dimension of conscience, which precludes the polity being contracted in law, of it being formed after and without reference to religion (always already decided privately by each individual), of the political being subsumed (tamed) in a contract without being aligned with (a) religion: the political, if not violence, is external to law, meta, the gift of each of us to one another.

Quotes

It would indeed be very hard for one that appears careless about his own salvation to persuade me that he were extremely concerned for mine.

For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another.

For laws are of no force at all without penalties, and penalties in this case are absolutely impertinent.

for men to impose their own inventions and interpretations upon others, as if they were of divine authority...

For the civil govt can give no new right to the church, nor the church to the civil govt.

For every church is orthodox to itself...

Let them not call in the magistrate's authority to the aid of their eloquence or learning lest perhaps...[it] betray their ambition and show that what they desire is temporal dominion.

For it will be very difficult to persuade men of sense that he, who with dry eyes and satisfaction of mind, can deliver his brother  unto the executioner, to be burnt alive, does sincerely and heartily concern himself to save that brother from the flames of hell in the world to come.

Laws provide, as much as possible, that the goods and health of subjects be not injured by the fraud or violence of others; they do not guard them from the negligence or ill husbandry of the possessors themselves. [This doesnt rule out helping the deserving poor, which is an expansive category anyway; it does allow for suicide, though I imagine Locke would reject that reading; this is why I would not conflate self and possession.]

It is not in the magistrate's power to repair my loss, to ease my suffering, or to restore me in any measure...

...I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust, and by a worship that I abhor...Faith only, and inward sincerity, are the things that procure acceptance with God.

The one only narrow way which leads to heaven is not better known to the magistrate than to private persons...

although the magistrate's opinion in religion be sound, and the way he appoints truly evangelical, yet if I be not thoroughly persuaded thereof in my own mind there will be no safety for me in following it

In the common affairs of life, the use of indifferent things which God has no forbidden is free and lawful; and therefore in many things human authority has place. But it is not so in matters of religion.

These things are no lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they in the worship of God.

If it be once permitted to introduce any thing into religion, by the means of laws and penalties, there can be no bounds put to it... 

You will say that the magistrate being the stronger will have his will and carry his point. Without doubt. But the question is not here concerning the doubtfulness of the event but the rule of right.

Just and moderate govts are everywhere quiet, everywhere safe.

But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotions and that is oppression.

I dont remember if I've said this before. If my friend is, say, a global warming denialist, I am not going to convert him by argument. Neither of us reads or can read the research of climate researchers. So the focus shifts to our intermediaries. I read the Times, he reads the Post. But each of those is actually implicated in a vast network of references and authorities. So my network is different from his. But I want to argue that this equality is not in fact the case. That my network is better than his, truer than his. Because his is narrower. Mine cant be skewed by any one source, his is very vulnerable to bias. Because his has been determined by the question of who he can trust, rather than by what is plausible.

Life cant be an end in itself. Ie how long I live, or my health/fitness (think about that slippage). My antinomian liberalism doesnt make the claim, but I still think the mistake is interesting (it seems to be slogan on the stationary bike I ride at the gym).

That what is wrong with libertarianism is not self contradiction (though it does assume an equality it cannot account for) but what it just ignores, ie religion--the third person, the political.

The problem with libertarianism is the thought that religion can come after economics, not before. That was Nozick's correction, a unifying symbolic dimension to the state, which looks like simple fascism. Which raises another question: arent they grounding the political in the economic, in property? And can property be a ground? Not like religion, unless one owns oneself? Locke thought so, but thereby came up with a (radical?) redefinition, grounding, of property. By founding property in labor he is in fact positing techne as arche. Filmer would have grounded property differently, in inheritance, ultimately from the creator himself. Would Burke object to any grounding at all? He would certainly side with Filmer. By defending labor, we may (to retrieve the laundering metaphor I used for the right) working toward a world where property is an effect of labor.

Why would it ever seem plausible to me to invoke the harm principle and stop halfway through it (a la Nozick)? [I had a thought and then I lost it; maybe found it in next para] There is a completeness to saying govt can extend only to presumable consent, ie to non interference (though such consent is meaningless, and such self interest objectifying). But there is no justification for non interference, for no trespass, that doesnt entail aid. Even if you associate independence with property, and even if property precedes the state, per Locke. Locke is explicit that the state owns, not the contractors. You cannot take, or receive, power over another, as noted. But there is something more to be said, about the negativity of govt as responding to trespass. Ie not a question of what we do but of what govt does. The issue is agency: we give the govt no agency of its own, it belongs to no one, no one. The duty of govt is to preclude govt. So we are talking not just about crime and law enforcement, though we are operating above the level of 'common law' (from Locke to Berlin, much is assumed?). My rights are not just 'against' govt, but against 'govt': govt is not in line with rights, but precluded by them. What's precluded is the political, not the economic ie voluntary. Fine. There is no closure of death in law and unity of persons in person; and thence of person in God. A man is only known as a man by his death (vs. afterlife and judgment which marks law). His death is what is held in power: power is power of death. Govt precludes you taking another's death? That agency will not coincide, ie mine with yours?

Think not in terms of harm or help, as opposite of harm, as if need were a special case. One may have specialized need, ie a surgery, but that is not the point. Need is, if amenable, a question of money, hence of labor. Independence and dependence. After slavery, if I am no ownable, my labor is as good for your life as for my own. That's the paradox. If death is not law it is the other. My finitude, my agency, (choice) is another's life. The other is the only end. If I am slave to no one--there is no 'one'--I am responsible for everyone.

The enlightenment seems marked by complacency. Men who think they are very bright and thinking things no one has thought before. High school debaters. The confidence that the world will unfold itself before our reason; very different from Sh.'s apprehension (2?) that humanity is stepping out on a stage.

You dont understand the question of being, you havent really asked it, until you have admitted to atheism.The pursuit of stupidity leaves us vulnerable to lies but secure in our faith.

Philosophy, as that knowing which knows itself, presence, hasnt happened. We are always already too late; we missed the connection.

Reasonable Christianity. As if no one had ever been burnt for socinianism. From Locke--with Erasmus behind him?--to Jefferson. But the science they endorse will separate man from the world, and thus stretch god to the breaking point. Copernicus and Gallileo, and the discovery of deep time: the world is ours not in purpose but only in power. On the hand, science has nothing to do with religion, answering how rather than why, yet on the other it pushes god away, back in time, til time itself becomes an issue, and strips him of humanity, and makes him unknowable, without content. The evangelical sense of rebirth may be the only way to feel god today. Though they also believe in miracles, which is precisely what science robs him of.

Note, as Yvor Winters did?, the prevalence of breakdowns: Johnson, Hume, and later Mill.

Man has greater and greater control of the world, to less and less purpose. Unto the ability to destroy it.

NB how strange it is that China and Iran really believe that their citizens are incapable of action; that any politics is the interference of foreign powers. I dont think any American politician, even today, would say that explicitly, as opposed to exploiting the fear, if not of foreign invasion--foreign law cited in supreme court decisions egad!--then of ungodly subversions within. Yet it is the greatest thing about America that we have, in theory if never sufficiently in practice, popular sovereignty.

Unlocking women frees gay sex. This is just the conundrum of humanity, its non-naturalness. A non natural domination of woman will allow repression of gay sex. Natural is obviously a difficult word; this is just a provisional formulation.

For Hg, the instrumentality of thought is a fundamental misapprehension. We need to think from within (thinking). There is no knowledge of the whole, separate from the whole. No secret absolute. Thinking thinkng is thinking the world.

The more perfect our knowledge--the planet earth is blue--the more impotent we are--there is nothing I can do.

The thought of education related to the discovery of primitive peoples? The thought of culture? of different cultures?

What flipped the reformation from a dispute between augustinians and franciscans to the thought of the church as a whole, identified with the pope, and the pope with antichrist, and the inversion into providential history and erastian control for princes?

The prime directive is the only thing Americans ever argue about. We believe in toleration, even knowing it is the law of no law but this law. Though sometimes we prefer lawfulness. Thus Trilling is right, even as Lukes is too (Liberals and Cannibals). We veer from Rawls to Sandel. But the pointlessness, endlessness, of the debate--not ended by the possibility of meta-political or meta govt?--

Protestantism is more invasive, better social control, than ceremonial catholicism. It is protestantism that puts windows in men's souls? The community, or rule, of the elect (why sola fide looks like an ethic of works) brings state and church closer together than the international catholic church ever achieved. 

Conservativism, focused on law rather than govt, needs no faith in the masses, the individual: or can see the individual as the other to the masses, a la Tocqueville. There is no contradiction in rule by the elite if the maintenance of law is the point; nor in censorship for the same reason (vs. leading the masses astray). Democracy is never justified by law. See above on the prime directive. Democracy looks like mistaking the ethical for the political.

The opposition to trials for terrorists is the desire to oppose them with the military, which is assumed to be more willing to kill. What's interesting is the convergence in foreign affairs of what is held apart in domestic.

Hume's theism is vague enough to have inspired Kant's aesthetic. Note the centrality of Gallileo to the argument, and the pre Darwinian explanation of evolution as trial and error. Indeed, the whole project is scientific, which is why it cant be religious. We are reaching the point where 'natural religion' seems a contradicton in terms, which will be finalized by Kant (?): but Kant will sacrifice religion to keep philosophy and science together? It's for giving up on philosophy that Kant rejects Hume? NB that the position that Philo rejects and Cleanthes defends but on which they merge is the "machine" of nature. What is really saved is humanity, the difference between man and beast? And hence the remarkably pale defense of theism, of the connection of man to God? If the intelligibility of the world is reduced to its techne, its availability for meaning, but not the meaning itself, a formal theism? Thence a representation of theism, that cannot claim truth or certainty?

Article in the Times today about the TX governors race; the distinction between conservative republicans seems to hinge on knowing which conspiracies are acceptable and which are not. Otherwise, the primacy of property and guns seems the ideology, which makes perfect sense, as the closure of the political is the strengthening of the executive; the absolute identification of law and death, which means there is no need for consent or democracy (save a parliamentary consent to taxation?).

Need to look into Erastus. If he is talking about a 'coercive' power, he is presuming conscience? That would be the change from Marsilius? Apparently he is separating the punitive power from the church to the state; that the state would exercise coercion in religion is taken for granted, but the interesting thing is the inactivity of the church.

Is there any interesting connection between Enlightenment elitism and democracy? They stand for atheism as dogma, rather than conscience? For law obvious to reason, not antinomianism? Indeed, looking at nature scientifically, and thence man scientifically, natural law must have seemed obvious, to be taken for granted.

The Pauline defense of rule depends on anthropocentrism; the Lockean premise that no man can rule another man is completely foreign: the separation of man and law, of man and God. The rule of law is the exact opposite of the Pauline injunction. What happens is equality as the denial of God. I mean, there is no law of equality, no natural law or natural rights: the rule of law is an effect of negation, ie that no man can rule another (man). The definition of man is in the exclusion of religion, the creation of conscience. The categorical imperative is command without a commander: not what Paul could imagine. Commandment is human purpose, our subsumption into purpose; without it we have no purpose, just ends or appetites. Or say rather that humanity has no purpose? Is freedom error if I have no command (over another)?

We could have a govt that only prosecuted theft. But it would not preclude slavery, by its own definition. Precluding slavery would require another law. And I insist is the same as universal suffrage: both rest on the same justification, the separateness of conscience. It's not a question of what's intolerable in the ancien regime, but of what you want, what you are willing to commit to, what you require. Not that you are ineluctably committed to slavery in a night watchman state, but that if it is an issue for you you will need this other thing (universal suffrage, a political irreducible to economy/property rights). You might define slavery as theft, but that would define non slavery as self ownership; and I dont think you can clear the hurdle: if my labor is a commodity it might be bought whole.

Did I mention that the conviction that markets produce cornucopia, that the economy is always coextensive with society, is neo malthusian, in the sense that it ignores technology or nairu: it conflates the economy with the labor available. The difference between economy and society is unemployment, or money (rates).

Revolution, to be revolution, has a moment of anarchy. And it doesnt occur without a utopian ideal to replace the status quo. Ie it is only in the conception of the ideal that revolution becomes thinkable.

Conservative is command, respect for authority figures; liberalism is question authority; conservatism is personal, liberalism is anonymous. Conservatism is intra human, anthropocentric, liberalism is extra human, environmental and darwinist?

Whether controlling sexuality is a mask for enforcing religion or vice versa...

Burke might say--if he ever spoke so badly--that liberalism thematizes democracy, makes the means an end.

Can the night watchman state exist without some outlet for the political per se, ie England had monarchy? And note that monarchy declines as suffrage is extended (Victoria: I will not be queen of a democracy). The king embodies the unity of men in a man. The market offers no purpose, only privacy; saving is deferral of having an end; accumulation as if not to die; our only end ourselves, ie what are we? Purpose requires a certainty of death (purpose is external to the life, as if another person, which is precisely why we dont allow one life to dictate purpose to another). The effort to limit govtto the economic thus starves us of purpose. The solution offered is death in the service of your country. Instead of kings and their wars we have defense. There was originally no thought that defense would require standing armies, that by it's very nature it would be illimitable because unknown threats are infinite. The idea of national purposiveness, of nationhood, combining the interests of the people and the rulers, is a ruse of kings in the face of a rising middle class that can be coopted against magnates and barons. Within a democracy the only purpose would be another person (after Kant). We locate purpose in a romanticization of the soldier (his killing is always subsumed in his risking being killed). As frequently noted, political activity, ie disagreement and dissent, is treason when we are under attack, so we are always under attack. The denial of the political internally creates a no man's land externally. If our freedom is the same as our property, we are not free because we give freedom to each other (a republic, as long as we can keep it) but because we are stronger than those who would take from us. Go back to the Levellers: the fear of the stranger among us vs. property and borders.

The slippery slope does begin with putting property at risk, because that is the emergence of the political. The danger is the political reifying itself as the state and demanding our lives. The alternative is religious establishment.

The greek thought of being, of what is, to be as intransitive verb--truth and falsehood. But now we say existence is a question of whether a class is empty or not; the question of why anything at all exists is disallowed; but therefore theism is disallowed?

The broad story of socinianism, from Erasmus to the enlightenment, doesnt interest me but does confuse and challenge me. My understanding of catholicism, in so far as I understand it at all, is pinned on the rejection of philosophy. Thus I have no handle on Thomas, or on the rehabilitation of Thomas in response to the reformation by the spanish thinkers--to eradicate Erasmus to replace him with Thomas? Within this dichotomy, it's hard for me to imagine the hope that reason and faith might converge, rather than damage each other. The English alternative TR describes, promoted by Grotius, seems built upon this hope. But More seems dubious, Bacon uses a deus ex machina. Pace Bacon, what's really damaging is science, Copernicus, Gallileo, on to Darwin. Is science to be separated from reason?

Consider the claims of reason against dogma in the area of education, up to a "natural" education that is no education at all, since any education is a falsification (man is born free yet everywhere in chains). Or that faith is authority, ie the authority of the teacher.

If Castellio is using God as always higher law, even to his religions, leading to separatism and on to antinomianism.

A poet without a unified culture is lost, his originality is just egotism. (I'm trying to fob off my failure on the culture.) He  has no reason to write.

Liberalism begins in religious freedom, ie man. Everything else follows from that.

That what's upsetting to me about uppity christians is that they wont admit to the unified voice of my childhood. I meant this as a mea culpa, the msm just doesnt reflect their values. But then. They claim not to be a minority but the majority, to be American, in exclusion of me. I too miss Walter Cronkite. The question of who is really the majority, is not a question of democracy, but of avoiding it. It is the anti govt rhetoric of the right, and the strong identification with the president as the real govt--a president doesnt disagree with himself, like congress. What I had described as acting, in the public square, on principle, which may be religious or not, vs. pushing your religion into the square: if you are not defending your principles but your religion, you are not acting as an individual or citizen. Your loss is not a loss on a particular issue, but a usurpation, as if you had been denied a vote, disenfranchised, pushed out of the political process. Your identification with a group is parallel to the end of the democratic process. But the loss on the issue came first; the claim that your religion, qua religion, was excluded is a post facto justification. If I didnt win, it's not democracy, because I am the majority, by
definition. The distrust of the media is more than working the refs: for only in the media is there a reality. Without it, the fiction that I am the majority can survive. Disabling the media, ie via balance, allows the turning of democracy against itself.

Back to the harm principle. Someone will say that if no one has property no one has property to give. I've been vacillating between harm principle and the destruction of property claims. What if they are to be combined? There is a kind of communism within capitalism, from each to his ability to each to his need, which is actually a capitalism based solely on labor transactions, ie without land ownership--complete usufruct.

What is the relationship between Laffer supply side one for one of taxes and growth and the neo malthusian conviction that welfare uses workers to maintain non workers (NB the lieutenant gov of SC, Will on Katrina and D Brooks on Haiti, Himmelfarb on the two cultures, Murray on created poverty, Gilder's poverty as spur, Holbo's Donner Party conservatism re Frum, etc.)? Both assume a rigid for self for other dichotomy. Laffer assumes that economic activity is completely voluntary and that if I am not doing (mostly) for self I wont bother to do it. That for self for other is the decision point. But the other here isnt real; he makes no demand. There is only the incentive to more economic activity; I mean, economic activity is decided by the for self, not any systemic limits. The anti welfare argument makes the same assumption about economic self propulsion and perfection: anyone not working could be working (or would not have been produced if his parents were working).

What is the claim of the man upon the good samaritan? His humanity--that is the new thing, that is the call. Humanity is the call upon our-selves: is the other? Humanity is the emergence, visibility, of the for self for other choice. Humanity is the solvent of property. Or humanity is indifferent to property. The claim of the human is a claim against self, that I choose between self and other. It therefore subjugates property, but is not essentially about property. But I want to explain that it is the self other distinction that cuts into property, cuts us from our property, and puts property into play: makes poverty a harm. This shows itself as a subordination of property in the creation of the public, a reserve or social insurance fund, an artificial, deliberate, usufruct. The public is that which belongs to no one, and therefore to everyone.

Conservative reduction of society to enterprises, and thus allowing the failure of a family firm, even if it means death: the for self taken to obliterate the for other, which it actually presupposes. There is no for self until there is a for other. There is no capitalism (labor) unless there is humanity. The conservative suppression of the public is a suppression of democracy.

Are conservatives the ones who stand on principle? Why else would they be conservative? They see a principle that needs to be enforced. What is it? If it doesnt exist, that would explain the obstructionism of the party today. They had to fall back upon it, but it wasnt there. They can only say "no". And without committing themselves they can win back a majority and put into effect their crazy policies and then be voted out again and the process goes on.

Adiaphora entails a distinction between what is known and what is believed that is fatal to orthodoxy. It ultimately results in Kant. The idea of adiaphora is important because it signals that the toleration debates arose within christianity, ie because of the reformation. Only two christians could have adiaphora. They werent meant to excuse toleration for Jews. And note the charge of pharisee-ism can only be leveled within christianity; it reclaims Paul from the church. Paul is the beginning of the church, the impossibility that it has a beginning, that it begins in an act of interpretation? Is orthodoxy the bad faith of the church, that it knows it exists only in the failure of the final judgment? (Hardly any comfort for Jews in toleration being built upon the accusation that catholics were the new Jews. How much of the horror at Servetus was his toleration for Jews? As Europe develops, is there more and more focus on Jews as the enemy, rather than pagans--ie as christians become Romans?) The distinction between what is known and what is believed is the origin of science. And of the individual: that's what the individual is: the one who thinks differently. NB that orthodoxy falls with anthropocentrism. Cf. they they and atheism in Heidegger. It is the situation of Descartes and his demon.  cf. Luther's "Here I stand," and compare with Castellio's you burn a man. Is it the result of the fold by which humanity comes to know itself, think of itself (it cant actually be "known")?  You have to be educated, and know you might have been educated otherwise.

Chadwick notes that Jews were generally protected by law in the early centuries of xtianity. But that would be the remnant of Roman law?

Are Neuhaus et al arguing for what, as good catholics, they know to not be true: that toleration within christianity does not entail tolerance without, indeed dissolve the bands of law and faith until conscience covers atheism? Another way, that protestantism must devolve into separatism and antinominism? What is known and what is believed: believed means taken on faith, ie from another person. What disrupts that transmission is writing? Is it important that Erasmus was a bastard? The cult of friendship? The possibility of mail, ie alongside books, and no pun intended? And thus of travel.

The middle ages ends with the fear of an heretical pope, just as Europe escapes his grasp. When he is finally stripped of all political power, after the formation of Italy, a council grants him immunity from heresy? The pope is granted an implacable conscience?

Is Luther's submission to God over the church (over Christ) any different from Milton's use of him?

What is the political dimension of predestination--its 'purpose'? It freezes politics here and now, but they have to been felt before there would be a need to freeze them? For Luther indulgences are no different from works, both are efforts to bribe God. Luther is the absolute rejection of politics vs. the "liberals", the socinians: Erasmus etc.? NB that Erasmus was trying to enliven the faith, beyond dead ritual: that is in a way a charge of pharisee-ism.

Think backwards: that all power is ordained by God: that God is power (between men): what would it mean for there to not be power between men? Rule of law? (offices)--obviously self contradictory to them. Recall the pope's claim to be a servant of servants. Command, in two senses, is essential to belief in God: they are the same thing. To question authority is to question anthropocentrism. Paul awaits the judgment, which is imminent, but doesnt therefore see a need to reconcile obedience to the prince to obedience to God; that is, there is no political implication to Jesus because he is subsumed in the coming judgment, so the state can remain as is.

Adiaphora separates knowledge from faith, and so encourages works. Faith is 'known' by demonstration. Faith, separated from salvation, means predestination is impossible. Knowledge, freed from orthodoxy, becomes skepticism and science. Knowledge freed from orthodoxy is conscience. The division--contradictin--of the church is now the division within man? The church's balance between deferral and revolution, between orthodoxy and works, the neither/nor both/and of its temporal power, breaks apart into conscience vs. rebirth?

NB that when Castellio claims that a man is being burned the implication is that all belief is from men. That is the end of orthodoxy. Man is that separation of truth and belief, the possibility of universal deception. What is the connection to Erasmus's disdain for the they, for the folly of negotium? And cf. Machiavelli's confidence in fooling all of the people all of the time. 

What is at stake is the church's basis in anti donatism. It is always powerful to assume God is on your side, though you have to have a side, the thought of having a side, ie conscience. The balance lost is anti donatism. In this context, Luther is true to his Augustine: he is more anti donatist than the church, but that could only be in rejection of Erasmus? Predestination trumps any donatism, and his pauline erastianism prevents the church itself from donatism.

Because of the long history of anti semitism we might tend to think of Nazism as merely the culmination of a tradition, but isn't a break, a fetishization of anti semitism? There are other faultlines in European culture, why that one? If anti semitism flourished in the wake of the reformation, so did witch hunting. And Germany was famously highly assimilated. And they had the slavs to demonize.

If you believe your country has been taken from you you dont believe in democracy. Ie you think your democracy was taken from you, but it cant be.

If the Republicans are sure the vote for Democrats in 08 was not for Democrat policies then they have to admit it was against Republican policies.

Would submission, as rejection of self confidence, be the same as belief?

Was Newman unable to condemn slavery because to do so would admit religious difference? Anti slavery depends on man, and man on toleration?

What if we got very abstract, forgot about property and voting, and asked "am I responsible for harm I did not cause?" That would be the fundamental question? If so, the answer is yes, because you make a choice not to provide help. A conservative might say this vitiates free will, both of the one taking responsibility for another's actions and of the victim. A bright conservative might argue that this is consequentialist, and the real issue is whether the law is obeyed, not what the consequences are. This is, as I understand it, Sklar's objection to Scarry. We side with Scarry. The implication of the harm principle, with its emphasis on harm, is that we cannot draw a line between acts that cause harm and the act of choosing against ending harm. We cannot draw a line between positive and negative. Im convinced that autonomy assumes or implies responsibility for the other. All I'm really saying is that the golden rule applies: the more I define myself by my independence of the other the closer I pull him to me.

Some context: I assume the political arises out of religious dissension; that any non religious law runs into the diremption; that natural right theories must be theistic (or crypto Kantian, viz Hittinger on Ferris and George). When is faith functional, vs. command? For Harris, eg, it's always functional, about fear of death. We make random distinctions between cults and religions, even within religions: Mormonism can be a religion, the fundamentalist encampments are not. So the American jihadi: because he is American we assume the religion is serving a psychological purpose. (If I call Mormonism a grift gotten out of hand, I'm still not disagreeing with Bloom's approval of it as uniquely American?)

Thesis: Islam is uniquely (?) vulnerable to fanaticism, because it eliminates mediation between man and God. And in so doing, eliminates inwardness, psychology, philosophy: orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. There is no Islamic culture, only the interaction of Islam with other cultures, in Spain, Persia, India. Or, from another perspective, if Diamond is right the nomadic Arabs were unable to settle in their environment, to create cities, and hence culture. The interaction with the first world, therefore, based in oil, is really on top of a bottomless difference. Think of men in robes walking around Dubai skyscrapers (mortgaged to the hilt). But also, is the relation of faith and sex sharper in Islam, does it offer an absolute erasure of the sexual (by the absolute segregation of women)? Is it significant that Gahan and Hammani are "converted" just out of puberty? Islam offers the absolute opposite of western liberalism (and its privacy): the opportunity for martyrdom. And in martyrdom the convergence of law and death. (Martyrdom by suicide belies the point?) Indifference to death is to be one with the will of God? Everything that worries me about evangelicalism seems to made explicit in Islam. An abstraction or totalization of religion, among a people living in the most inhospitable land. A religion well suited to conquest?

Is conspiracy theorizing due to 40 years of conservative attacks on reality (conspiracy replaces democracy, and human intent replaces science) or is it a remnant of theism?  The silent majority, the (real) country within the country.

"Campus Conservatives": aggressively offending people's sensibilities upholds the universal, or/and pares the perversity posing as diversity. Probably significant that there is no argument, only performance.

Natural law is a way to give content to the thought of man, make him comprehensible and thus attach him to orthodoxy. It does respond to Lutheran misanthropy, but more to the thought of man that precedes Luther.

Adiaphora and the fundamentals flip places for the enlightenment. The fundamental becomes personal, and, because rooted only in--answerable only to--God, protected. Or rather, adiaphora pushes the fundamentals inward to disconnect them, to bifurcate orthodoxy into two levels. NB Elizabeth on windows into men's souls. The internal, conscience, becomes, by definition, immune to coercion. Cf Brazil. Immune to coercion presumes a separation of law and force: conscience is the emergence of this separation, the possibility of rationality as law, and the separation of law and execution or punishment, of the rule of law rather than of a man over men.

Does toleration for conscience underlie Locke's idea of consent, differently from Hobbes? Ie Hobbes does not discuss law, his sovereign is not by law, but superior to it, law is his means. His argument is Foucault's: the power of life is the power of death. To hold the social contract to lawfulness requires that conscience be identifiable with faith, ie not secular, not available to atheists? The alternative to lawful contract would be Kant through Rawls, as attempts to overcome the problem, or the idea of the gift and positive law theory as indifference to it. Neuhaus is thus consistent with Locke in arguing that a strain of democratic theory presumes faith.

Toleration for conscience underlies free will.

As conscience becomes God it becomes unamenable by force, by govt, and imperative. This is the paradox of democracy: the individual must assume he is right or wouldnt bother to vote, but could still be wrong, ie not in the majority.

The distinction between otium and negotium is mapped onto inside/outside, with a loss of the edge of paradox in More. Conscience is without power, in two senses; the place without power is nowhere. Surrendering power is folly. Truth is the absence of power, that which commands assent. But otium, for More and Erasmus, wasnt fiction (Sidney). And the power sphere is negotium was not eliminable. Where conscience is real power is not, where power is real conscience is not. The emergence of conscience thus implies or coincides with the reduction of negotium to negotiation in the economic sense, to contract (the overtaking of the political by contract theory?). Machiavelli refused this reduction, and looks amoral. (The use of mercenaries would be the ultimate commercialization?) As the liberty of the city is the liberty of its citizens, so the citizen is soldier. Erasmus despises war: does this rest on an expectation of class? Does it produce economics? Cf. the tolerant Ragusans, the Venetians, the Dutch: all the cultures West despises (as if death were always violence, and life only valuable set against it). Eg the Dutch preventing Stuyvesant from excluding Jews in NY.Was there discussion of the aristocracy lapsing from the warrior class to the property class? In Burke? We know the truism that a republic cant be too big; therefore larger states--not cities--fall into classes. Re the emergence of economics nb the passions and the interests. Also that conscience is the lever on society, as if outside of it, from which totalitarian projects can begin. The transformation of man, from within. The sanctity of conscience relegates govt to the consensual. Ie, the incompetence of govt in matters of conscience, that it can only falsify conscience, separates church and state (Bainton is unimpressed with Locke because he doesnt like separation, Zagorin likes Locke because he likes separation?) Govt can be by consent because it is powerless in religion? (Ie, not by right, more by default?)

Conscience is the 'ground' of right, from which govt is contracted, the un-natural state of nature? Indeed, for Locke, the 'end' of govt is preservation of 'property,' which includes life and liberty; the state of nature is not very natural at all, and govt is restricted by its 'ends'. But NB especially that heads of state are said to be in a state of nature; that war is to seek domination over another. Contra Machiavelli, but with Erasmus, political society is the opposite of war. [The premise of equality (I mean assumption, but that too has two meanings), that no man, qua man, can rule another man; the law before the law, the contract before the contract; that every man is his own executive in the state of nature; govt as means to end rather than end in itself (what is relation to man as end?).] Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Acton is repeating Augustine, but in the age of conscience?

NB that Machiavelli believes that power is superseded only through power. The northerners seek to find common ground, reason eg. Utopia, not war.

Understand Burke's revulsion at these contract theories, at political 'science,' at the presumption of 'explaining' ourselves to ourselves, alienating and objectifying ourselves; at the extraction of the political from all context and deduction of society from it.

Liberals believe in taking from those who dont need it and giving to those who do. That means big govt, but not strong govt. Conservatives believe in small govt, but strong govt: able to enact what laws it wants and executing them without exception.

Is free will identifiable with the thought of death? ie of my finitude? My disinterestedness is my awareness of my finitude. And evil with the denial of it?

I have been confused. An argument against property (proof that property is not) is not compatible with the idea of democracy as gift. And the gift with meta govt, universal suffrage, constitutionalism. Communism doesnt escape property; state ownership is still ownership; thus the similarities with feudalism, and indifference to conscience, the individual, politics. (cf. Pound vs. money, capitalism vs. class and nationality?) The only non property is the gift, which, again, I am going to identify with universal suffrage, the separation of the political from the law. But is anti slavery then a gift? If the golden rule is; the recognition of the other in the relinquishing of the third person law. Giving up the law is also giving up punishment (turn the other cheek). What's required is suspension of faith; that's where we start from, where the gift comes in--it is not a question of giving up a law of reason to which assent is possible, but of toleration, for which there can be no law. I am close to the claim that xtianity is itself a relgion of toleration, which I guess depends on a reading of render unto caesar; but I dont think this would be acceptable even to an anglican.

Neomalthusianism is elaborate(ly circular): draining resources from the productive for the unproductive is what retards economic growth; the economy would be self sustaining, except for this govt'l redistribution on behalf of its clients, this rent. And these people would be working, if not for the availabilty of this rent.

Isaiah is our proof text against the death penalty. (Even in a universal govt the difference would persist, still just be a govt of man, for man; not of the other animals, eg.?--and the separation of man is always question begging?) I'm thinking of Iran having a law against making war on God. Is death penalty, even when restricted to murder, about the lawfulness of all law rather than any one law?

Is Locke's free contractarianism the same thing as his ecumenical theism? And both are self contradictory? A theory of the origin of property is as much trouble as unorthodoxy. The self evidence of law for him is the same as the self evidence of god? Govt forms for more efficacious executive powers; the law is given (cf. Hobbes, there is no law; he can have contract theory because he doesnt claim any law for it). Is "man" another name for this self evidence, his presumptive transparency to himself? Thus the reification of "reason". Both God and law are untouched, presumed; there is no tension therefore in a consensual govt, because there is nothing to disagree about and nothing controversial for it to do.

Conservatism is fundamentally paternalism, and the political is any challenge to the rights of the father? We can see it in Locke and Burke, and Dickens. The emancipation of women is deeply disturbing; any crossing of the line between the clay and the maker is intolerable because it destroys the father. But post Darwin it is hard to defend patriarchy outside of a religious context. Neuman may have realized he was dissembling, but in any event the entirety of the conservative project is pushed into dishonesty by this problem. Is the family really in trouble if paternalism is? Is paternalism ingrained in the culture, or the opposite? To say that Father Knows Best is just to raise the question; the heartbreaking end of Fiddler; the urgency of the question in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. This is not Lakoff's pyschological argument: one can really believe that the family is in danger and thus everything else is in danger too. Yet except for some baptist declarations about male headmanship the right disguises this agenda as pro-family. As if there are no families on the left.

Obvious point via Diamond: if you are always looking for food and shelter you dont have time to make culture. There is nothing to hand down from generation to generation if there is no surplus from year to year.

Hell is other people means the persistence of anthropocentrism?

The rule of law, the separation of law and person, the accountability of the sovereign, these are all liberal problems. Conservative anthropocentrism doesnt distinguish command from law. Ie we create our own chicken egg problem of the authorization of the sovereign(ty).

There is no freedom in error and you can't consent to law. All (meta) govt is for the prevention of corruption by power? (So Locke wasnt wrong to focus on the executive.) For the conservative power is ineluctable because man is evil, fallen from the law; for liberals because we can never agree on the law? For conservatives polities fall into the dimension of religious unity; for liberals all political claims are ultimately universal (individualist): or, rather?, without specifically religious authority? So liberal democracy is an effort to govern without dependence on religion and without power corrupting. Power is ineluctable: only religion could unify; and we dont claim to have overcome diremption: we 'vote' because we dont 'know'. The application of the bill of rights to the states opens a floodgate of individual vs. community conflicts; a federal govt dedicated to the individual over the community or family looks monolithic even if its power is in the name of the individual. The question of what prejudice (in Burke's sense?) is tolerable, or not the business of govt to correct--what, in Berlin's language, is natural--of what to grant to conservatism, because it has no bearing on the political question of tolerance and checks and balances, remains? And is not necessarily the constitutional question of whether there is a bar on regulation of sex (no) or on voluntary school prayer (no).

Originalist theories would claim to start over (Rousseau); to subject sovereignty to law; to identify govt authority with morality, to which it is itself subject; it doesnt exceed the law, as by controlling borders, it is not answerable only to God; to totalize society, by identifying the origin and by perfectionism: the closer the sovereign to law and the people to morality the less need there is of sovereign exception. The identity of law and morality denies evil (the necessity of command and punishment, the superiority of the sovereign to the law). Not subject to a human, humanity is transparent to itself; nothing can escape its dominion or correction; disagreement must be false consciousness, etc.

What makes Hobbes, and Machiavelli, seem sui generis in their contexts, hence modern, is their a-theism?

Tolerance creates man; man challenges property (inequality)? If you believe that man 'exists' you can believe that politics does not impinge economics, that there is something purely political, protected in and by "rights." Thus Waldron? The appeal of libertarianism is simply the obviousness of property as a stopping point. Property as the medium--and content--of consent. But does this hold if govt is not another person, ie king? Is property the border of consent or its conscience? Is consent required of the property holding class, or of all men? The more conditions parliament put on the king the closer they got to reform: the king was the site of the political.

If of all men, we have the idea of all men, and of mutual responsibility. It's not that property is de-based and un-founded, but that it is irrelevant, or, better, impotent, so that the golden rule applies. As if we found ourselves with this distribution of property? You are only more than your property if you can give it away? As if you were dead--turning the other cheek. True autonomy is no possession, at least of land? Is non power? esp. over others? Think of dependence as giving you power; power as separate from law (responsibility, ie even if the dependence is not your fault). Power is not tolerable because conscience is opposite of power. Cf. the difference between non slavery as self ownership and no ownership.

If of all men, we are seeing power in a way that Machiavelli did, or could, a way that class obscured in the north? The modern day version of property qualification is the restriction of govt to maintaining a stable market, presuming the voluntarity of all participants, ie of everyone, blocks out religion (protects it?), even if true would simply evade the political.

Rainsborough's every man has a life = Castellio the heretic is a man?

The tea party seems to be saying the same things republicans have been saying for 40 years. When the party divided over appealing to independents and staying pure it produced the tea party. But if the tea party doesnt recognize itself in the GOP, it must be spiraling into impossible purity.

Per Skinner, the development of modern political thought is the development of the possibility of revolution. Think about that. The political only begins in the resistance to govt, in the definition or recognition of govt: that it is something that could be changed. Different from God, or God's command? No concept of the political, no concept of office?

Reading Southern on Abelard and Heloise, the reality of sexuality must have been so hightened by its rejection.

The "Arminian" / socinian pro anglicans had no reason to doubt that a rational religion was possible. The discrepancy of reason and faith would be revealed over time. They didnt foresee Darwin; would barely be aware of Gallileo?

Roy Porter's 'The Enlightment': "For one thing, ever since the American and French Revolutions, a programme of political goals has established itself definitively in the Western world. We all now believe in government of the people, by the people, for the people. We believe in universal suffrage. We believe that democracy safeguards liberty; we believe in parliament, in elections, in representative government, in the party system. For better or worse, these have become the sacred cows of Western 'democracy.'" [23-4] But do we believe?

Maybe fear isnt tool for undermining democracy, but the result of loss of faith in democracy, in man, retrenchment in religion (certainty). Islamism isnt problem because unmodern, but because an enemy. Against individuals, one chooses prejudice, tradition, family and religion, a purposeful life, being at home in the world (of our creator). That toleration asked too much, too much uncertainty, about gender, about death? Yet we dont surrender science, progress, the driving force of capitalism? Our very ability to destroy the world? Asking people to vote against their interest in favor of principle has a limit. We can see the conservative argument so clearly, against liberalism, not in defense of the given, ie we see the premises of liberalism, because the owl has flown?  Is it just that I am old enough not to take liberalism for granted, to see the other side, or that I give too much ground in arguing for liberalism as a choice of worldview, a commitment, not an argument commanding assent by any rationality?  How much of this retrenchment from democracy, from universalism, is related to a sense of American weakness, decline?

Cf. Locke on reasonable xtianity with Erasmus and Browne? The significance of friendship, from Browne to Falkland, and More and Erasmus before?

Without exploration would there have been "savages" and hence a study of man's emergence from savagery? And hence perfectionism?

Death penalty precludes any kind of perfectionism? Blanks out the human itself? Holds open the place of God, denies Isaiah, and denies the concept of a life; separates man from man, there is no rule of man, nor its absence, ie conscience.

Enlightenment opposition to superstition and prejudice means it must be a minority taste?

Greater transparency of man to man and power over himself is greater power for state, unto revolution and re-education, going back to savagery and doing it right; Burke and Foucault agree?

That know thyself would amount only to technology; the objectification of self/man. Only really knowledge in Hegel, as knowledge of spirit in history, by blanking out Darwin et al.

If I'm right about homosex as other to sex, I might also resurrect the idea of commiting adultery with your wife.

Why were the Stuarts such a disaster? I think it's because of the French.

I need to find conservatives to talk to. I assume that the criteria now are laissez faire and being armed to the teeth.

The culture of death might be the fear for religion itself. Is that thinkable? What sort of ecumenicalism is presumed? And if ecumenical, it cant be a response to tolerance, even though tolerance really is problematic from the point of view of orthodoxy. If the enemy is science, its hard to disagree; ie think of end of life now, everything that followed from Kathrine Quinlan? And on to IV, and organ transplantation. Our biomedical technologies really might be a culture of death, and not abortion rights and gay people. But any threat to theism, ie copernicus, gallileo, geology, on to darwin: threat to anthropocentrism, and hence to an afterlife. Environmentalism, that humanity is just another species. Very threatening, especially in an American context, so dependent on immortality to justify individualism and ameliorate failure.

Is Calvin's Geneva ultimately as erastian as Henry's England? Certainly Luther depended on the kindness of princes, who had their own agendas against the emperor or the church. The reformation realized Marsilius's Italian program across Europe?

Autonomy presumes conscience and antinomianism; the harm principle therefore resolves into golden rule. Kant, eg.

The church wants independence from the prince without becoming a prince in itself; this neither nor is easier before the prince claims sovereignty? The crowning of Charlemagne should be understood as a break from the emperor in Constantinople, not an authorization of Charlemagne. He needed no such authorization, and the Pauline church had nocause to give it. The church then preferred multiple kings vs. one emperor. From the emperor's perspective, and that of his church, the inheritor of Peter might be first among equals, but the church, even based in Rome, is subject toNew Rome. The Byzantine efforts to take control of Italy should be seen in this context. As its focus shifts to its own borders north and east Europe emerges in the absence of Rome (empire).

Man is the will to represent man. Representing representation: the circle of Sh, his centrality to the humanities.

Conservatives hold to the death penalty because it is their religion; that God might commute his death penalty for us.

Taxes in general is a meta question, anti govt: not to be identified with laissez faire.

Despotism punishes as example (pliable populace); conservatism punishes to make the law real; liberalism punishes to correct/educate.

The separation of law and property begins with the end of feudalism but doesnt end with private property (parliamentary voting). Law emerges as other to property: universal suffrage.

Conservative says man is wolf to man and thus we need to protect law; law is holy, man is not. But the Burkean / conservative horror at the law being used as a means does not necessitate perfectionism as liberalism, rather the antinomianism of the harm principle. The absent third person (God).

Jesus as a politics vs. all the efforts to depoliticize him, from Paul on. To return him to God, and return God to rule.

Tolerance of the sexual act is a gap in law; cf. constitution: no protection from state regulation of sex. A gap in law, in turn, is intolerable, thus focus of relgious conservatives on sex over poverty: if sex is free religion is unsafe. NB sex is not the point of the harm principle, but it is the crux; dont think of it as a dimension, a space, a privacy. Not a self, not to be compromised, separate from other selves by definition; the minoritizing paradigm. Not exempt from the law but against the law--do I mean of another law, or against any law? In any event, truly radical, not to be regularized as an option among options.

American protestants did keep millenarianism. An echo of the founding?

With the law uncertain Americans double down on punishment; in lieu of separation of person and law the combination of them in punishment.

Conservatives wont separate the content of command from the structure of command. In property they are combined.

Equality is contra law (command). The rule of law is contradiction in terms. Equality is the law of no law, the harm principle. So at one extreme is slavery, and at the other no property--which is (just) to say, no slavery? Ie,equality is 'defined' in terms of property; we are not talking about equality in talents, per Williams, but defining inequality 'as' property. Equality is non property (and not property in self). Equality is the opposite of property. Non slavery is the opposite of property. Universal suffrage is the opposite of property. If non slavery is just aquestion of property rights, there is no necessity to democracy (from it), no meta govt. The issue is not whether my property impinges on you or vice versa, but that we be equal. Not that you do or dont have the means or intent to enslave me. The issue is not circumstantial. Rather, that equality is 'defined' as non property. We dont need to define property, as land or labor: equality despite property requires property be controlled by the political: to exclude it is to rewrite a property requirement into suffrage. This is the doubleness of libertarianism. Traditional conservatives thus saw the threat as democracy itself. Our conservatives claim to defend democracy (with a circumscribed, homogenous, silent electorate), argue that capitalism is a stopping point, democratic but not to tax. This begins in anti communism? It is certainly abetted by the bad economics of supply side. The binary with communism allowed us to be divided from ourselves (there is a panic at the other, a vertiginous self suspicion in order to keep yourself separate); thus it was easier to claim to represent the real America against some alien influence, a slippery slope to the USSR: that the wrong turn was paper money, or the income tax, or the overturning of Lochner, or the New Deal. But then there was an overconfidence in macro as the means of managing the economy, so some truth to the claim that govt was impinging upon, and hence impeding, the economy. But the absolute denial of macro, that govt cannot be an actor in the economy, that money and aggregate demand dont exist, that is bubble policy. One cannot consent with qualifications; one consents to another, not to a law. We dont consent to be equal in that in which we are equal; we consent to be equal.

Religion qua religion minimizes the public square: without conscience, difference, there is no need for it. This is obvious. Add in that public entertainment--theatre--seems ipso facto irreligious, a danger to faith. Also, did liberals reject religious participation in the public square in debates over women and sexuality because the religious posed the question as that of the survival of religion, rather than acting as religion in support of an otherwise secular goal (racial equality eg)?

Conservatism has made narcissism a public good. By reducing all human activity to the market, one's greatest contribution to society is to be the best you you can be. Such alienation from self, and hence from other people, that you could conceive of paying a life coach. Ultimately, to buy organs. NB Thatcher, there is no such thing as society = no such thing as other people.

What is the best spin I can put on Americans voting republican? That they believe competition produces good results, in all areas of life. Not that they expect or would tolerate those who fail to die. With the focus on competition is a sentimental relation to fathers (the one person you are not in competition with?). Competition implies rules, not competition unto death. Rules means, in some instances, laws. Ie the commitment to equality that precedes liberty for the libertarians but which they deny. What really interests me is the specialization of some areas of life that make competition meaningless. Yes, there is competition, but only after much education, which itself is competitive, but has to begin in the given (2 senses). The emphasis on competition provides no solutions, but, per Reagan, there are no problems. Patriotism precludes problems. For the rest, there is paranoia: the middle disempowers itself in the belief that it is empowering itself (from govt).

The church's anti donatism hits a road block in the problem of heretical popes? The greater the papal authority, the greater the pressure to deal with this issue. The closing upon one man, ex cathedra, forces the donatist problem, for he is the church, but he is a man; he speaks for the church, but he might be a heretic. Is infallibility compatible with anti donatism? Keeping councils in reserve for emergency? Only the whole church equals the pope? But equals: he equality of the council to the pope is precisely the pope's claim?--relate this to the neither nor of the church's power?

The rise of socinianism, deism, unitarianism--what in England is called Arminianism? and why?--via Grotius's hope for an international--vs. catholic?--church, using Melancthon's adiaphora--ultimately forming the core of Locke's argument, which excludes atheists and hopes to save, defend, religion. Religion in the abstract, what originally horrified the opponents of toleration, but now is their defensive line?  Philosophy is always a problem for theism; the church thought it could hold the line at Aristotle after Thomas. The philosopher is the child who keeps asking why when the parent keeps saying 'because'. This is the root of Locke's rational liberalism, reconciling autonomy and law in natural law and deism, in universal religion.

In the first centuries, there are christological issues to be worked out, hence councils, Nicea and Chalcedon. Only after that is there a church; and the church interprets its mission to be the maintenance of orthodoxy, of one voice; so all bishops are one bishop (and hence anti donatism) and thus all are Peter. Then the church is busy fending off the emperor in Constantinople and missionary work in northern Europe. It succeeds Rome: it is the ghost, or spirit, or transcendence of Rome, the universal empire. The failure of Rome is proof of human impotence, and the church, in its authority, qua church, is fighting against the arrogance of New Rome. Under the Pauline interpretation of Jesus, always deferring the political, (time itself is deferral; the Judaic law is a mistake, letter for spirit, but so is every law; the claim to a higher law is the denial of resistance) which means submitting to existing authorities. In this context, NB Machiavelli focussing on Roman history and ignoring the church. 

Is non slavery the same as non ownership of land? Is this the burden of the argument that non slavery is non ownership, not self ownership?

The purpose of meta-govt--democracy--is, only, the redistribution of resources as necessary. To be pro life, in this sense, ie anti death (penalty), is to be antinomian, ie meta govt. The closure of law and death is the crux of the claim of conscience and redistribution, and the opposition of hard law and property.

The for self entails the for other; divorces you from self to create the choice. This is just another version of non third person leaving us with golden rule?

Im rereading Southern on the church in the middle ages. The image of the Benedictine dominance is striking: society organized around, and for, the monastery. In so far as there is a society, its around a monastery. NB his argument that from 1100 on economic expansion led to dependence on clerks, who remained churchmen, and thus, while demoting kings to laity, empowered an organized institutional church.

Keen: the church is complicated by the rise of Thomism and the mendicant orders, and then its battle with the HRE permanently divides Germany and strengthens France and England.

The individual is defined in opposition to the state. The state is defined in opposition to an international aristocracy and feudal convergence of property and law?

Against govt means against democracy, against the claim of equality upon property. If Americans prefer to risk falling to dependence: what about the children? Wont somebody think about the children?
One cannot be made to work for another; somehow this contains its opposite: the responsibility to work in lieu of he who cant. Not that everyone is responsible for himself but that self shall be denied to no one; in so far as we work for a self, and not a law, no one's self can be allowed to perish. Opposed to this would be the claim that everyone should be at risk of failure, even unto perishing. But would allowing to perish not presume the possibility of enslavement? The worth of every individual self that underlies non slavery also demands we all work for all selves: from each to his ability, to each to his need. The idea of responsible for himself separates self and work, end and means. It isolates my life, as and end--mine or anyone elses. The denial of death to law has this effect of creating the individual life, of making it valuable: cf. Castellio.

Donatism is the opposite of orthodoxy: that's why Augustine saw violence as justified. Any particular heresy is corrigible, but heresy itself, the claim to independence from the unity of the truth, is not justifiable.

There is a connection between Islamism and the diaspora, an irritation/exacerbation of the distinction between the two houses. Its not that we interfere in the house of Islam, its that we tempt Muslims who have left the house. What happens outside is projected inside. Still, there is the impregnable circularity: that one must fight the west because it is not Islam, that your impotence is proof of their repressing you.

Capitalism is the creating and filling of demand.

I was wondering where people got the idea that the federal govt has grown enormously. It sounds so 80s. Then I recall that we own AIG and GM.

The shock is the possibility that the GOP was right to be uncompromising, either because the core commitments--no taxes, big defense--are popular or because there is no other anti govt outlet. Thus they can lock up the protest vote, even if no one is closer to the banks than the GOP.

To be anti govt in a democracy is to be for a community, imagined or otherwise. Can it be for an individual? Conservatives can claim to be against govt interference because they dont unsettle traditional morality in the name of the individual, and they dont disturb property. Their governance is invisible so long as you are not in a minority and have some property to protect.

The political persists so long as property could overtake it, so long as class might emerge. It disrupts inheritance, directly or by providing for children, education eg. It says that poverty is a harm. That is related to the separation of death and law. The goal isnt equality of property. Equality eats into property, but is not about property. The point is that no one suffers for his parents. Giovanni: you didnt choose to be born white. We escape Williams charge of unending equality? The separation of the person from his inheritance is what creates the possibility of harm by poverty. Meta govt creates the situation in which poverty is a harm. NB what anti slavery means, ie the equality of men, ie think about the reverse, the possibility of slavery. Non slavery requires equality, universal suffrage, meta govt. In a world of only privacies (Thatcher), no public, there is no equality.

From expression as act to expression as thought--via K's copernican revolution? We defend the media; in China, eg,this is strange?

The renaissance in the north was the reformation. There was no history in the north, no culture. The church encompassed everything. NB what Macculloch says about the popularity of indulgences in the north vs. the south, the credulousness of the north. The north lacks the Machiavellian dimension of the political, ie the political. NB Machiavelli's opposition to mercenaries (per Keen a real problem in Italy), for the identity of the "freedom" of the city and the citizens is in the citizen soldier. Cf. Castiliogne. Save for Sidney, who fits that definition of the courtier in the north? (Ralegh? the cavaliers?) The north produces the pacifists like Erasmus (in defense of govt as opposite of war:TR). The north also produces kings, who eventually free themselves of and dominate their barons by appeal to the commons (nationalism). (Elizabeth as symbolic king, ie symbolic man, creates this autocratic symbol?) Maybe what I'm getting at is a division of the political between the two swords that doesnt apply in Italy? Division and domination that keeps the political infantilized in feudalism and creates the culture of the auctoritas and summa? The domination of the north by religion is the retardation and insularity of the middle ages, vs. Roman erastianism and divine emperors? We understand that the middle ages were dominated by christianity, but to understand the domination of religion, of religion as domination? The submission of this world to another world, which obviates the political (Augustine) and pervades the world with meaning.

TR on Nicholas Hill, atomist: cf. Donne. Atomies and farts suggest the question of what air is, which Hobbes was concerned with. What is the relation of atomism and platonic hermeticism, the creation as fall, secret knowledge?

Pope as anti christ is continuation of structured--finite--history and hence middle ages. But nb the emphasis on the prince as the savior, the combination of political and religious. The unity of the elect? The identity of the papacy and (its) secular power enables the reformation to be a battle of powers, the HRE vs. the Schmalkaldic league, or Gustav. The Pauline identification of secular power with God allows Luther to ignore Augustine's defense of the church against the secular pirates.

What I take from Bush admin is their disdain for truth; for the reality based, for transparency and accountability, etc. An end justifies means mentality even in war.

Nothing affirmeth means doomed to repetition?  Sidney becomes Bloom?

Was Calvin asserting a universal sovereignty via religion, religion qua religion, in burning Servetus? When Castellio says a man is burned Calvin would say yeah, so? Of course he's a man, not a donkey. Does seeing man, qua man, require his not being the center? The identity of death and punishment is necessary to hold man in the center.

The humanities protect humanity from the law.

If we could get people to believe in their individuality--Free To Be You and Me--they would be liberals; ie if what they were defending from govt was their selves. Vs. protecting their religion, family rights, patriotism (diversity is perversity). Individuality means freedom from law, conscience, means harm principle. The point is not that disinheritance debases all property (as if state of nature), but that we see each other as equal, as interchangeable; there is no family, there are only strangers. I have before rejected the harm principle as too much like charity, and therefore withholdable, in order to prefer creating a property right for the poor. But now I think I want to reclaim the thought of charity, and see the obligation as between persons, not person and land. If there is a freedom to charity it is in the acceptance of democracy itself, not in a preferance for private vs. public giving (Reagan eg).

A good catholic would say that I am treating the secular world as if it were the divine, applying Jesus instead of worshipping him. Would a protestant have the sophistication to make the argument?

TR on Milton: he believed in liberty for himself, that his mind should not be subject to any lesser. That he should be free to study the Italians, even if not properly christian? Anyway, politics and religion come together in English possession of the (men of) virtu that has left Italy and marks the ability and deservingness of England of a starring role in the providential history, to populate a republic. The rhetoric of servility/slavery vs. strenuous liberty; his conscience is his greatness, his freedom is freedom frm the hoi polloi. Episcopacy is orthodoxy is restraint of the greater by the lesser. The paradox that man is doomed to servility by his disobedience? Milton reconciles his own disobedience, as writer, by writing obedience, ie scripture? The temptation of knowledge, to be God and thus not be commanded by the law, is precisely Milton's temptation: he wants a protestantism without priesthood in order to be his own priest and push the authority of God (command) off into a future, to free his own election. He will submit to God, not to a church. And the ultimate submission is the dedication of his epic talent to the bible?

I keep coming back to the question of what do the Tea Party's stand for, what do they want? If all they have is the negative, combined with the idea that their country was "taken" from them and they want "it" back, then they are the purist of paranoia. I have not identified them with the irreconciliable remnant that the conservative movement left behind, convinced that they are the majority by decades of conservative propoganda, because they didnt seem to be the christians, yet maybe they are, in their ideological emptiness, the real remnant. And Obama's "difference" just makes more credible the claims of usurpation. Their apparently self declared independence of the GOP throws me off though; I had expected the remnant to identify with the GOP. Maybe the party's insistence (in congress) that it is eschewing compromise to keep its purity is evidence to them that it is not pure. NB that if you are convinced that only Fox is telling the truth there is a spiral of affirmation and ignorance. NB that states rights is the conservative response to, check upon, federal power, while the liberal response is individual rights. The individual doesnt exist, is the stranger; the state can seem closer to a community, which is why the liberal favors the federal over the state, as less captive to any majority. The state is a community, a microcosm of law, the universal dirempts into antinomianism.

Is sprezzatura economy of means? 

Liberal equality emphasizes that circumstances are not natural, and so invites the claim that we are perfectionists; on the one hand that one's situation is not deserved, on the other that equality cant stop short of eugenics (Williams). Ie, we cant clearly distinguish nature from nurture: this the point of Williams. Liberalism separates man from the world in the sense of challenging anthropocentrism, and hence theism (law of command). This is what conservatism reacts to as leaving man naked, to determinism, eugenicism, or communism/utopianism.

Saw a magazine cover with Palin on it, asking "can she save America?" from what?