Political Philosophy

A collection of Jonathan Swift’s journalistic texts

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Attentive readers of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle will remember Daniel Waterhouse reading a a number of astonishingly vile newspapers. Some of the most acrimonious articles were from Jonathan Swift, writing for Tory papers. Stephenson didn’t make that part up, the articles can be found here.

I didn’t have time to do more than a bit of browsing, but some of the historical characters from the Baroque Cycle are mentioned, like Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Harley and of course Queen Anne. There also are extensive footnotes explaining the concrete circumstances under which the articles appeared.

Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.

Quote of the Day

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…what has helped the less fortunate is economic growth. Today’s elderly are affluent not because of Social Security, but because of all of the wealth created by private sector innovation over their lifetimes. Government involvement in health care and education is an impediment to progress in those fields. Job training and welfare are demonstrable failures. I think that treating a national community like a family is a grave intellectual error. A national unit is an institution that creates a legal framework for a large group of strangers to interact. A family is a small group that interacts on the basis of personal bonds. Strengthening government serves to weaken families and other vital civic institutions.

Arnold Kling

(You absolutley must RTWT. Mr. Kling puts terribly important ideas across in clear, plain English.)

Quote of the Day

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[The] determination to build Jerusalem, at once and on the spot, is the very force which is responsible for the intolerance and violence of the new political order � if we believe that the Kingdom of Heaven can be established by political or economic measures � that it can be an earthly state � then we can hardly object to the claims of such a State to embrace the whole of life and to demand the total submission of the individual � there is a fundamental error in all this. That error is the ignoring of Original Sin and its consequences or rather identification of the Fall with some defective political or economic arrangement. If we could destroy the Capitalist system or the power of bankers or that of the Jews, everything in the garden would be lovely.

Christopher Dawson (and here), Religion and the Modern State (1935), quoted in Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War. (As of p. 152, the Burleigh book is excellent.)