41. White, according to Erick Erickson, is literally a “trinity denying heretic.” See Erick Erickson, “An Actual Trinity-Denying Heretic Will Pray at Trump’s Inauguration,” Resurgent, December 28, 2016. http://theresurgent.com/an-actual-trinity-denying-heretic-will-pray-at-trumps-inauguration/
42. C. V. Wedgwood. The Thirty Years War (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), p. 506. I should note that the next sentence reads, “Instead, they rejected religion as an object to fight for and found others.”
43. Quoted in James Q. Wilson, American Politics, Then & Now: And Other Essays (Washington, D.C.: AEI, 2010), p. 144.
44. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity, p. 8
45. Elizabeth Palermo, “Who Invented the Printing Press?,” LiveScience, February 25, 2014. https://www.livescience.com/43639-who-invented-the-printing-press.html
46. Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2015), p. 89.
47. Benoît Godin, “ ‘Meddle Not with Them That Are Given to Change’: Innovation as Evil,” Project on the Intellectual History of Innovation Working Paper No. 6, 2010, pp. 16-27. http://www.csiic.ca/PDF/IntellectualNo6.pdf
48. Deirdre N. McCloskey, “Creative Destruction vs. the New Industrial State: Review of McCraw and Galbraith,” Reason, October 2007. Accessed via http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/galbraith.php
49. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity, p. 421.
50. Bailey, The End of Doom, pp. 89-90.
51. Sheilah Ogilvie, “ ‘Whatever Is, Is Right’? Economic Institutions in Pre-Industrial Europe” (Tawney Lecture 2006), CESIFO Working Paper No. 2066, pp. 13-14. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1004445#
52. Jerry Z. Mueller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 5.
53. Marian L. Tupy, “Anti-Capitalism Through the Ages,” Foundation for Economic Education, September 15, 2016. https://fee.org/articles/anti-capitalism-through-the-ages/
54. Ibid.
55. Mueller, The Mind and the Market, p. 6.
56. Ibid.
57. Mueller, The Mind and the Market, pp. 5-6.
58. Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press), pp. 338-39.
59. Mueller, The Mind and the Market, p. 167.
60. Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 2009 [2007]), p. 79.
61. “The function of entrepreneurs,” Schumpeter writes, “is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.” Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd edition (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008 [1942]), p. 132.
62. Ibid., p. 143.
63. Ibid., p. 162.
64. Ibid., p. 249.
65. When the French poet Gérard de Nerval famously walked his pet lobster through the Tuileries gardens—“It does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep,” he quipped—it was cheap and largely harmless performance art. When Flaubert completed his novel Salammbô, he hopefully anticipated that, “It will 1) annoy the bourgeois…; 2) unnerve and shock sensitive people; 3) anger the archeologists; 4) be unintelligible to the ladies; 5) earn me a reputation as a pederast and a cannibal. Let us hope so.” David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010, Kindle edition), p. 67.
66. Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 278.
67. According to Nietzsche, the knight doesn’t need to hate his enemies; it is sufficient for him to simply know they are his enemies. Because the ruler deals in the currency of power and will, he can identify his foe simply by virtue of the fact that his enemy’s interests conflict with his own. Once he has defeated his enemy or come to some other satisfactory resolution to their conflict, he is no longer his enemy. There is no need to lose respect for one’s adversary. One sees this dynamic among military men often. Men of (conventional) power respect other men of power. But the priest full of ressentiment needs to hate his enemy, to see in his every move proof that he is evil, representing all that the priest despises. Here is how Nietzsche contrasts the knight from the priest:
A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man; actual “love of your enemies” is also possible here and here alone—assuming it is possible at all on earth. How much respect a noble man has for his enemies!—and a respect of that sort is a bridge to love…For he insists on having his enemy to himself, as a mark of distinction, indeed he will tolerate as enemies none other than such as have nothing to be despised and a great deal to be honoured! Against this, imagine “the enemy” as conceived of by the man of ressentiment—and here we have his deed, his creation: he has conceived of the “evil enemy,” “the evil one” as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the “good one”—himself!
He also says:
While the noble man is confident and frank with himself (, “of noble birth,” underlines the nuance “upright” and probably “naïve” as well), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors, everything secretive appeals to him as being his world, his security, his comfort; he knows all about keeping quiet, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily humbling and abasing himself. A race of such men of ressentiment will inevitably end up cleverer than any noble race, and will respect cleverness to a quite different degree as well: namely, as a condition of existence of the first rank, whilst the cleverness of noble men can easily have a subtle aftertaste of luxury and refinement about it:—precisely because in this area, it is nowhere near as important as the complete certainty of function of the governing unconscious instincts, nor indeed as important as a certain lack of cleverness, such as a daring charge at danger or at the enemy, or those frenzied sudden fits of anger, love, reverence, gratitude and revenge by which noble souls down the ages have recognized one another. When ressentiment does occur in the noble man himself, it is consumed and exhausted in an immediate reaction, and therefore it does not poison, on the other hand, it does not occur at all in countless cases where it is unavoidable for all who are weak and powerless. To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long—that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Keith Ansell-Pearson, ed.; Carol Diethe, trans. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007 [1994]), pp. 21-22.
68. McCloskey, “Creative Destruction vs. the New Industrial State.”
69. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 145.
70. Quoted in Matthew Continetti, “The Seer,” National Review 67, no. 5. March 23, 2015. https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/414923/seer
71. George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham.” http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh.html
72. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989), p. 4.
73. Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” Constitution Society, January 27, 1838. http://www.constitution.org/lincoln/lyceum.htm
5: THE ETERNAL BATTLE
1. Loc
ke writes in the Second Treatise:
Though I have said above, Chapter II, That all Men by Nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of Equality. Age or Virtue may give men a just Precedency. Excellency of Parts and Merit may place others above the Common Level. Birth may subject some, and Alliance or Benefits others, to pay an observance to those to whom Nature, Gratitude, or other Respects, may have made it due; and yet all this consists with the Equality which all Men are in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another, which was the Equality I there spoke of as proper to the Business in hand, being that equal Right that Every Man hath to his Natural Freedom, without being subjected to the Will or Authority of any other Man.
John Locke, “Chap. VI: Of Paternal Power,” sec. 54, “The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1960]), p. 304. I will be using this version throughout for quotations from Locke, preserving his usage of English.
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on Political Economy,” The Social Contract and the Discourses, Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses#lf0132_head_069
3. Michael Locke McLendon, “The Overvaluation of Talent: An Interpretation and Application of Rousseau’s Amour Propre,” Polity 36, no. 1 (October 2003), p. 115.
4. Barack Obama, “Remarks at the Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus—December 4, 2013,” American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=104522
5. John Maynard Keynes, “Chapter 24: Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy Toward Which the General Theory Might Lead,” The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Project Gutenberg. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300071h/printall.html
6. I am drawing my account of Locke’s life largely from Peter Laslett, “II. Locke the Man and Locke the Writer,” in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, pp. 16-44.
7. Those looking for a full account should consult Michael Barone’s Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers (New York: Crown, 2007, Kindle edition), from which my account derives.
8. Michael Barone writes: “Other rulers followed [Louis XIV’s] example. In Bavaria and Brandenburg forceful rulers broke the power of the estates, as did the rulers of the Rhenish Palatinate and Baden. A similar process occurred in the domains of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Denmark and, a quarter-century later, Sweden developed absolutist government, while in Spain and Portugal the power of the legislative assemblies, the Cortes, was sharply curtailed…Many in the smaller German states feared the trend would prevail there…Republicanism was on the wane, alive in the bustling Netherlands and backward Switzerland, ailing in a declining Venice and extinct in most of the rest of Italy (with the conspicuous exception of the small city of Lucca), defunct after the Restoration in England. The forces resisting absolutism were those asserting ancient, arguably feudal, rights, and local particularity: the vestiges of the past. Absolutism, seemingly modern and efficient, seemed the way of the future.” Michael Barone, Our First Revolution, Kindle location 145-49.
9. Ibid., Kindle location 2938-39.
10. William of Orange, “Declaration of the Prince of Orange, October 10, 1688,” Jacobite Heritage. http://www.jacobite.ca/documents/16881010.htm
11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Constitution Society. http://www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm
12. Locke, “Chap. V: Of Property,” sec. 49, “The Second Treatise of Government,” p. 301.
13. Locke, “Chap. II: Of the State of Nature,” sec. 4, ibid., p. 269.
14. Ibid.
15. Locke, “Chap. III: Of the State of War,” sec. 19, ibid., pp. 280-81.
16. Ibid., sec. 24, p. 284.
17. Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review, 87, no. 3 (September 1993), p. 568.
18. Locke, “Chap. V: Of Property,” sec. 27, ibid., “The Second Treatise of Government,” pp. 287-88.
19. Ibid., sec. 41, p. 297.
20. John Locke. “Book II—Chapter I: Of Ideas in General, and Their Original,” An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/locke-the-works-vol-1-an-essay-concerning-human-understanding-part-1#lf0128-01_label_314
21. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003 [2002], Kindle edition), pp. 5-6.
22. Locke, “Chap. II: Of the State of Nature,” sec. 6, “The Second Treatise of Government,” p. 271.
23. James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 158.
24. Locke, “Chap. XI: Of the Extent of the Legislative Power,” sec. 142, “The Second Treatise of Government,” p. 363.
25. Locke, “Chap. IX: Of the Ends of Political Activity,” sec. 131, ibid., p. 353.
26. Locke, “Chap. IV: Of Slavery,” sec. 22, ibid., p. 284.
27. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, p. 138.
28. Michael Locke McLendon, “Rousseau, Amour Propre, and Intellectual Celebrity,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 2 (April 2009), pp. 507-8.
29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (London: Wordsworth, 1996), p. 641.
30. Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), pp. 390-91.
31. Voltaire, “On the Advantages of Civilisation and Literature: To J.J. Rousseau,” 30 August 1775, Letters from Voltaire: A Selection, Voltaire Society of America. https://www.whitman.edu/VSA/index.html
32. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, “Enlightened Enemies,” Guardian, April 28, 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/29/philosophy
33. David Hume, “Letter 407: To Adam Smith,” The Letters of David Hume, Volume 2: 1766-1776, J. Y. T. Craig, ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. 2011), p. 165.
34. Elena Russo, “Slander and Glory in the Republic of Letters: Diderot and Seneca Confront Rousseau,” Republics of Letters 1, issue 1. http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/slander-and-glory-republic-letters-diderot-and-seneca-confront-rousseau
35. Ibid.
36. Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution: A History, Modern Library Chronicles (New York: Random House, 2011, Kindle edition), Kindle location 281-90.
37. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Book I: Chapter I: Subject of the First Book,” “The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right,” The Social Contract and Discourses, Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses#lf0132_label_057
38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The First Part,” sec. 130-31, “A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences,” The Social Contract and Discourses, Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses#lf0132_head_058
39. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 37.
40. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dialogues, Oeuvres, 1:935. Quoted in Eugene L. Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 46.
41. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Second Part,” sec. 207, “A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind,” The Social Contract and Discourses, Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses#lf0132_head_066
42. Ibid., sec. 214.
43. Ibid., secs. 214-15.
44. Rousseau, “The Second Part,” sec. 152, “A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences,” The Social Contract and Discourses, Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses#lf0132_head_059
45. These quotes come from an early draft of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality, quoted in Paul A. Rahe, “The Enlightenment Indicted: Rousseau’s Response to Montesquieu,” Journal of the Historical Society 8, no. 2 (June 2008), p. 293.
46. Quoted in James Schall, Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), p. 122.
47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Book IV: Chapter VIII: Civil Religion,” sec. 121, “The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right,” The Social Contract and Discourses, Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses#lf0132_label_146
48. Ibid., secs. 122-23.
49. Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 52.
50. Quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Rousseau, Robespierre, Burke, Jefferson, and the French Revolution,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, Rethinking the Western Tradition series, Susan Dunn, ed. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002, Kindle edition), Kindle location 4134. It should be noted in Rousseau’s partial defense that he believed the Social Contract would not lend itself neatly to nationalism because he believed communities must be small, like his beloved Geneva, to work. But ideas merely influence events, they do not dictate them, and Rousseau’s ideas deeply influenced nationalist movements across Europe.
51. Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 42.
52. Quoted in O’Brien, “Rousseau, Robespierre, Burke, Jefferson, and the French Revolution,” Kindle location 4136-43.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 48