Sublime

The God of freedom summons humanity to freedom: responsible, law-governed, self-restrained, the liberty that honours the liberty of others, but never less than freedom.

As John Stuart Mill so wisely said (speaking about social science, but it applies more widely): All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the who

Liberals believe that freedom is born of acknowledged eccentricity, complexity and nuance; that, as Mill puts it, ‘different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate’.

Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945. I’d often give this to my politician friends when I was in politics, and now I give it to students.

Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke set out to free political institutions from arbitrary rules and assumptions.

Mais, loin de tout déterminisme ou de tout manichéisme, il en dévoile les dimensions multiples et contradictoires : la passion de l’égalité, qui fonde la démocratie, peut se retourner contre la liberté pour frayer la voie au despotisme.

Ce n’est point hasard si la débâcle a amené au pouvoir un ministre qui, jadis, fut à Kienthal ; si les Allemands parviendront, peut-être, à y hausser un agitateur des rues, qui, avant de revêtir, dans les années d’avant-guerre, une fallacieuse pelure de patriotisme, avait été un des chefs du communisme. Il n’est pas, contre une certaine école polit

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