Sublime

In conceiving of the state as a generational compact, de Gaulle was echoing Edmund Burke, who defined society as ‘a partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’[69]

It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps

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

Il y a une limite à l’action légitime de l’opinion collective sur l’indépendance individuelle : trouver cette limite, et la défendre contre tout empiètement, est aussi indispensable à une bonne condition des affaires humaines, que la protection contre le despotisme politique.

The ancient law giver was a benevolent myth; the modern law giver is a terrifying reality. The world has become more like that of Machiavelli than it was, and the modern man who hopes to refute his philosophy must think more deeply than seemed necessary in the nineteenth century.

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.

Aristotle’s fundamental assumptions, in his Politics, are very different from those of any modern writer. The aim of the State, in his view, is to produce cultured gentlemen—men who combine the aristocratic mentality with love of learning and the arts.