Christopher Clark

“In situations of polarization and heightened anxiety, people tend to regard their own fears as authentic and those of their opponents as manipulated.”
― Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849

“In his System of Subjective Public Laws, published in 1892, the Austrian public lawyer Georg Jellinek analysed what he called 'the normative power of the factual'. By this he meant the tendency among human beings to assign normative authority to actually existing states of affairs. Human beings do this, he argued, because their perceptions of states of affairs are shaped by the forces exerted by those states of affairs. Trapped in this hermeneutic circularity, humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning to them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things.”
― Christopher Clark