Sublime

Many Frenchmen who had admired or even participated in the American Revolution were casualties of its bloody Gallic sequel. After testifying in favor of Marie-Antoinette, the former Count d’Estaing was beheaded. The erstwhile Count de Rochambeau, locked up in the Conciergerie in Paris, was condemned to the guillotine and survived only because Robes

The Ides of March

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

twenty-first-century science is undermining the foundations of the liberal order.

As the naturalist Edward O. Wilson put it, we’ve got ‘Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology’.

There is a chapter on the liberty of subjects, which begins with an admirably precise definition: Liberty is the absence of external impediments to motion. In this sense, liberty is consistent with necessity; for instance, water necessarily flows down hill when there are no impediments to its motion, and when, therefore, according to the definition

By contrast, modern political philosophers—from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth century—argue that the principles of justice that define our rights should not rest on any particular conception of virtue, or of the best way to live. Instead, a just society respects each person’s freedom to choose his or her own

Yet out of all this came an extraordinary, radically conservative attempt to rewrite Roman politics: wholesale change masquerading as an exercise in putting the clock back. Once re-established in the city in 82 BCE, Sulla engineered his own election as ‘dictator for making laws and restoring order to the res publica’. The dictatorship was an old em