Luís’s Reviews > Natural Right and History > Status Update

(...) 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.

(...) In fact, it is characterized by "want of society." "Society" and "civil society" are often used interchangeably. The state of nature is "loose." For "the first and strongest desire God planted in man" is not the concern with others, not even concern with one's offspring, but the desire for self-preservation.

"The Parisian philosophers ... explode or render odious or contemptible, that class of virtues which restrain the appetite ... In the place of all this, they substitute a virtue which they call humanity or benevolence." This substitution is the core of what we have called "political hedonism."

(...) However, the city of Athens, with its democracy, was, from Plato's point of view, a most imperfect city. Only the allegiance to an inferior community can be derivative from contract, for an honest man keeps his promises to everyone regardless of the worth of the person to whom he made the promise.

Yet, the crisis of modern life and modern science does not necessarily make the idea of science doubtful. We must therefore try to state in more precise terms what Weber had in mind when he said that science seemed to be unable to give a clear or specific account of itself.

(...) For the politicization of philosophy consists precisely in this, that the difference between intellectuals and philosophers - a difference formerly known as the difference between gentlemen and philosophers, on the one hand, and the difference between sophists or rhetoricians and philosophers, on the other - becomes blurred and finally disappears.