p. 314-316 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Plato shows that tyranny and democracy are the same. What is the missing element that the founders referenced and Lincoln realized? Who was Socrates interrogator, and what did he say?

Start with the dialogue from The Republic here, then go to p. 315 and start with this paragraph and read over to end of section on p. 316 (although p. 316 is not in Google preview, and needs to be read).

Interesting how "the people" was used from Plato's time, to the time of the Declaration, through to today as meaning some group other than my group. Lincoln rejects that and includes everyone in "the people."

p. 300 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What is Lincoln's favorite standard maxim?

Answer here starting with yellow highlight.

p. 294 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What are the definitions of barbarism and slavery as laid out in the Declaration of Independence?

The answer begins with the yellow highlight here and continues to the end of the paragraph.

p. 42 & p. 44 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

Tocqueville identified something in Christianity that made it a political necessity, but that political necessity was previously an object of ridicule in France. What was that necessity?

Answer:

As Manent argues, conservative-minded liberals such as Constant and Tocqueville found for religion 'its specifically modern political and moral credibility.' They praised it 'for the very reason it was formerly and even recently criticized: it is something above the human will.'

Which is why Solzhenitsyn was making a philosophical claim and not one merely rooted in faith, when he said that totalitarianism arose in no small part because "men had forgotten God." (p. 44)

And it's what Whitaker Chambers was talking about when he said that the crisis of communism exists to the extent that it has failed to free the people it rules from a belief in God. The crisis of the West exists, Chambers said, to the extent that it is indifferent to God.

p. 36 & 39 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

What is the danger of the separation of church and state in thought?

Answer:

"As Manent writes...'If the separation of church and state is precious as a rule of our actions, it become ruinous if we make it the rule of our thought.' To make it the rule of our thought is to deny the directedness of the human mind toward truth, toward 'the sovereignty of the object.' It is to permanently sever liberty from a searching engagement with the ends or purposes of human freedom. Lilla's 'art of intellectual separation,' in a desperate effort to maintain civil peace, risks giving rise to a new dogmatism that denies the natural movement of the human soul toward truth. It also assumes that the theological-political problem is frozen in time and ignores the new threats to human freedom that have arisen out of the modern 'solution' to this problem. Those threats include the specters of soft and hard despotism, as well as indifference to truth. These can be summed up in the striking phrase of the Hungarian political philosopher Aurel Kolnai: the 'self-enslavement of man,' which is a byproduct of the most radical and consistent interpretations of human self-sovereignty."

Connect with p. 39:

The law cannot be fully "neutral" about the good life--about the ends and purposes of human life--without eventually subverting the idea of human nobility and the moral foundations of liberty itself.

p. 21 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

Why is theory inadequate?

"In contrast to the tyranny of such an abstract democratic 'idea,' Tocqueville teaches us to practice the art of liberty within democracy and to defend the broader inheritance of Western civilization. The democratic order is not self-sufficient and depends upon a precious civilizational inheritance that it has trouble renewing and that it sometimes actively undermines. With no hope of simply resolving the 'problem' of democracy, we must draw upon its practice to correct its theory. But we must do so in the awareness that there is a tension in the very idea of 'popular sovereignty' between the abstract idea, always tending toward more radical interpretation and applications, and concrete exercise of democratic self-government. Instructed by Tocqueville, we are in a better position to defend democracy against those who love it immoderately."

My notes: Democracy tends toward the "more radical interpretation" in the West--that is, of total individual autonomy--but it can also tend toward a more Islamic state elsewhere in the world, which is also its enemy.

Connect Tocqueville and Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind. Robinson argues about the failure of scientism, which she identifies as a theory that fails to account for the human mind that created the theory.

p. 18-19 & 102 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

Why is the belief in man's self-sovereignty the first necessary step toward socialism?

Answer: It tell us we have the authority to relieve ourselves of the pain of living.

In Tocqueville's "Speech on the Right to Work" (9/12/1848), Tocqueville attacked socialism for making of man "an agent, an instrument, a number." He denounced it for "energetic appeal to man's material passions," its "unending and continuous" assault on the "principles of individual property," and for its confiscation of human freedom. In words that became the the inspiration for the title of Friedrich Hayek's famous book, Tocqueville wrote that "if...I had to look for a definitive general conception to express what socialism as a whole appears to me to be, I would say that it is a new form of servitude." Tocqueville identified democracy with "equality in liberty" and socialism with "equality in penury and servitude."

p. 102 What is the great modern outrage of the world that Tocqueville predicted?

Answer: "The democratic principle of human and civic equality has been radicalized, as Tocqueville predicted, into a passion for equality the perceives 'every distinction...as discriminatory, every difference as inegalitarian, every inequality as inequitable.'" So to connect with p. 19, the "pain of living," which is the greatest outrage of modern "values" has identified distinction itself as chief among the pains of living.

Also connect with Edward Norman's Secularisation. Same thing happened within the modern church.

p. 13 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

Ha! What did Tocqueville mean by "I have not yet become enough of a German"? Note this was the 1850's. The path to National Socialism was laid well before Versailles.

p. 5 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

What makes us free and what else is necessary to make us sovereign? Or perhaps a better 2nd question: What is different about the sovereignty of man in the Soviet Union vs. the United States? In what nation was man's status elevated higher?

partial answer: We are free because we obey our own laws.