Sublime

In Jefferson’s time, such opposition to government per se—such fierce frontier individualism—might have made Stevenson a real democrat; in the more complicated mid-twentieth century, his reluctance to make use of the powers of his office allowed the continuation of the vacuum in Texas government in which special interest groups—the Texas oilmen,

Despite the last-minute passage of the Social Security bill, liberal antipathy to Johnson was as strong as ever—stronger, in fact: 1956 had, after all, been the year of the natural gas fight and the exemption of highway workers from the David-Bacon Act, and new revelations about Johnson’s relationship with Brown & Root. Under a headline that was an

The consequence of this arrangement is, that at every new election the fate of all the Federal public officers is in suspense.

il est le premier théoricien de la séparation des pouvoirs politique et religieux et le premier penseur moderne de nos démocraties libérales. Mais là où il me semble encore plus moderne que nous, c’est qu’il a parfaitement perçu, alors qu’elles n’existaient pas encore, les limites de nos démocraties :

At the Freedom School, Charles became particularly enamored of the work of two laissez-faire economists, the Austrian theorist Ludwig von Mises and his star pupil, Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian exile, who visited the Freedom School. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom had become an improbable best seller in 1944, after Reader’s Digest published a

There is no point which serves as a centre to the radii of the administration.

The boldest theories of the human reason were put into practice by a community so humble that not a statesman condescended to attend to it; and a legislation without a precedent was produced offhand by the imagination of the citizens.

On en trouve une expression particulièrement aboutie dans un livre de William Riker, Liberalism Against Populism, qui pourrait avantageusement figurer dans notre panthéon des antipopulistes s’il n’avait été publié bien plus tard, en 1982, et s’il n’était la mise en œuvre d’une autre approche scientiste dans les sciences sociales : la théorie du