WesternFreePress: This morning, I joked with a colleague about how most of the human population would find the kind of political philosophy about which I am so passionate to be a crashing bore. And yet, so little do people realize how much they owe to political philosophers!
Nations are moved primarily by two things:
persuasion by words and coercion by force of arms. The military success of the American Revolution was entirely undergirded by the political philosophies of the founding generation and the Enlightenment-era thinkers upon whose work so much of that philosophy was based. Where would humankind be if that Revolution had been powered by a different philosophy, instead of by the words that began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . “? So, to all those who mock philosophers or get bored by political philosophy, that is your right. Just know that without good political philosophy, things might be a lot worse for all of us.
That being said, things have gotten bad enough. The truths that were self-evident to Jefferson and the Founders are under assault, and even scoffed at as throwbacks to a bygone time.
An interesting essay; one that examines important aspects of the non-aggression principle. Mr. Cook fails, unfortunately, in his treatment of threat as the basis for, and justification of, the use of defensive force. By not identifying not only the initiation of force, but also the credible threat of imminent initiation of force by an aggressor, he has to invent use-of-force categories that make little sense otherwise. It is worth reading, but keep my quick-and-dirty critique in mind.
Here is why our Constitution will always remain valid. Our Founding Fathers were realists. They knew that people were imperfect. They set up the Constitution and the Separation of Powers to take into account peoples’ foibles because they knew that imperfect people would follow them. They didn’t want one person or group of people to gain so much power that our nation would be ruled by a dictator or an oligarchy…..Wait, WHAT??
fuck