Sublime

This is the work of politics—understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

It is impossible to organize an orchestra on the principle of giving to each man what would be best for him as an isolated individual. The same sort of thing applies to the government of a large modern State, however democratic. A modern democracy—unlike those of antiquity—confers great power upon certain chosen individuals, Presidents or Prime Min

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

The philosopher Alphonso Lingus says, “We really have to free the notion of liberation and revolution from the idea of permanently setting up some other kind of society.”

In the heat of the struggle each partisan is hurried beyond the limits of his opinions by the opinions and the excesses of his opponents, until he loses sight of the end of his exertions, and holds a language which disguises his real sentiments or secret instincts.

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

Key to this conception of politics is the idea that we are embodied beings who flourish when we are embedded in interpersonal relationships and institutions giving us meaning as well as agency. Such a politics is postliberal and communitarian – one that avoids the excesses of liberalism without succumbing to the errors of populism or the oligarchic

great leadership works through the emotions.”1