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. 281 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

After the election of 1800 Jefferson said that every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. Consider the 1st Amendment and the American Enlightenment. In what way can we say that the 1st Amendment reveals a Christian orthodoxy? Why is the 1st Amendment heresy for Islam? Can Muslim orthodoxy tolerate the 1st amendment? (Answers to these questions are in my notes, and not necessarily in Jaffa's text.)

p. 263 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

In what regard can we say that "legislating morality" is the only way to secure the consent of the governed?

...Certainly the laws governing marriage and the family were as "domestic" as those concerning master and servant. The first platform of the Republican Party, in 1856, denounced the 'twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery.' Jefferson, in his Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishment for Virginia in 1779, grouped, 'rape, sodomy, and bigamy' as felonies of equal heinousness. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln trapped Douglas with the inconsistency of his doctrine of popular sovereignty which presumably left the people of a territory or a state 'perfectly free' to decide for themselves what their domestic institutions would be. Yet Douglas would not accept Utah either as a territory or state unless polygamy was abolished.

It was clear to Lincoln, although not so clear to many of his contemporaries, that the 'consent of the governed' could be rightfully exercised only within the boundaries of a moral law that gives consent its validity but whose validity does not depend upon consent.

p. 21 Nation of Bastards Farrow

What decision by the Ontario Supreme Court demonstrates the degree to which gay marriage also erases the definition of parenthood? What is the significance in the decision of the words "to allow"? Also, see here, and here.

pp. 170-171 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What was the issue that divided North and South as BOTH Buchannan and Lincoln saw it?

Lincoln at Cooper Institute, February 1860: "These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right."

See also "untranslatable" on p. 151.

pp. 154-155 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

In what way was Christianity an engine of freedom in the United States, and a barrier to freedom in Europe?

"...When the slavery question took on the dimensions of a religious question, the entire experiment in free government was thereby at risk." P. 155

The Audacity of the State, by Douglas Farrow

This drawing is my attempt to sum up this article by Douglas Farrow.

pp. 134-135 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

"It is true that during four centuries, beginning at least with Magna Carta, the organism of parliamentary democracy was slowly being formed within the womb of medieval monarchy. Yet the birth of the institutions of popular government awaited the passing of the divine right of kings and the transfer of the idea of sovereignty from kings to people. It is sufficient here to note that just as one peak of divine right monarchy is reached in the reign of Henry V, so another is reached in the reign of Elizabeth. But as the earlier peak is followed by the War of the Roses, so the second peak is followed, after Shakespeare's death, by another civil war. Cromwell's victory over Charles I appears initially to be a definitive victory of popular sovereignty over the divine right of kings. But Cromwell's republicanism ended in a military dictatorship, which in turn led to a restoration of the British monarchy. It required one more revolution, the Glorious Revolution of 1689, to end once and for all the pretensions of the Stuarts to divine right. But it required the American Revolution to identify the sovereignty of the people with the rule of law, in which the will of the majority can prevail only as it comports with the equal rights of the minority. The seemingly endless series of civil wars in England came to an end only as the divine right of kings was replaced by the God-given right of the people to rule themselves. Unfortunately, one more civil war, the greatest of them all, was required to confirm this right of the people."

Personal note: Note that without "the God-given right of the people" our rights are strictly a matter of positive law--bestowed on us by the government as by Cromwell--and therefore a strictly Hegelian system of government. Had we split into two nations and never fought the Civil War, and even if the South had outlawed slavery on its own, it would have meant a capitulation to the idea that our rights only come from the government. And it would have meant that for the North as much as the South.

Personal note II: The election of 1800 was the first to witness the peaceful effects of this system of government, and the Civil War preserved not just the Union but our God-given rights.

p. 18 Fellow Teachers, Rieff

"Our higher schools have the burden of teaching the art of critical interpretation; but they cannot, at the same time, serve as bases for thrusts of power against established authority...The arts of criticism can remain true only when they are unarmed...As the Marxist case demonstrates, even the highest criticism, armed, will defend its own establishment soon enough and prevent mind from entering those interior spaces opened and shaped by our continuous interpretative sciences...Our schools must be powerless institutions of the political orders in which they exist; otherwise, they cannot be schools...The relation between political power and pedagogic authority can never be simple and direct without becoming brutal, inartistic."

."..True criticism is never armed. Marxism lost in truth what it gained in power when it gained power over the Russians."

Personal note: relate to Matthew 22:17-22

p. 18 Fellow Teachers, Rieff

Rieff makes an argument in principle against a teacher taking sides while arguing that the politician is always wrong to struggle for neutrality. The principle for the teacher is patient thought (p. 13 footnote). The principle for the politician is right authority. The politician who apes the principled teacher is a fraud--the politician is always armed and always aiming to win. We can agree or disagree with whether the right or the left is correct in claiming "right authority," but the claims of neutrality by the moderate should always be distrusted because he's gotta gun and is aiming to win on his terms.