Status Updates From Natural Right and History b...

The more times I read this, the more I become convinced that it’s actually the most important work of philosophy in at least the past four hundred years.

(...) The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns, eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of "individuality." Burke himself was still too deeply imbued with the spirit of "sound antiquity" to allow concern for individuality to overpower his concern for virtue.

(...) Rousseau is distinguished from many of his followers by the fact that he still saw clearly the disproportion between this undefined and undefinable freedom and the requirements of civil society. As he confessed at the end of his career, no book attracted and profited him as much as the writings of Plutarch. The solitary dreamer still bowed to Plutarch's heroes.

(...) he called Bacon, Descartes, and Newton the teachers of the human race; he demanded that scholars of the first rank should find honourable asylum at the courts of princes, in order from there to enlighten the peoples concerning their duties and thus contribute to the peoples' happiness.