Sublime

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 conde

But their basic view of society and of information is surprisingly Marxist, seeing all human interactions as a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed.

“I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.”

Locke’s political philosophy was, on the whole, adequate and useful until the industrial revolution. Since then, it has been increasingly unable to tackle the important problems. The power of property, as embodied in vast corporations, grew beyond anything imagined by Locke.

Moreover they did not postulate a new man to be produced by the new institutions but accepted as one of their design constraints the psychological characteristics of men and women as they knew them, their selfishness as well as their common sense.

Against the more insane forms of subjectivism in modern times there have been various reactions. First, a half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual. This begins, in its modern form, with Locke, who is as much opposed to “enthusiasm”—the individualism

Ever since the first modern conservative, Edmund Burke, suggested that humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept them from the abyss, a major stream of conservative thought has been skeptical about the best-laid plans of mice and men. The reaction

Cette réduction atteignit sa conclusion logique dans les années 60 avec le mouvement populaire de «clarification des valeurs», qui n’enseignait absolument aucune morale. La clarification des valeurs enseignait aux enfants comment trouver leurs propres valeurs et conseillait vivement aux professeurs de s’abstenir d’imposer des valeurs à quiconque. B