Nothing I say here should be construed as approving a dictatorial remaking of our civilization. We do not need a Lenin or even an Ataturk. We require a new moral, legal, and political order that cannot be imposed from the top down but that must instead percolate up as the consequence of an intellectual and moral reformation.
The scientifically enlightened modern age, with its foundational belief in the unconstrained power of natural laws, from which it imagined everything that was, is, and could be causally explained and even predicted, was based on a conceptual self-deception. It lay in an inability to distinguish between the concepts of “logical necessity” and “the necessity of natural laws.” Confronted with the same problems that preoccupied Heidegger, Cassirer, and Benjamin, Wittgenstein might be said to have been concerned more than anything with clarifying the relationship between “guilt” and “fate,” “freedom” and “necessity,” “faith” and “knowledge,” “being there” and “being like this” as the central concepts of any truly mature life.
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.
The liberal side of Burkeanism could eventually come to terms with that picture of politics as argument. To the Maistrian side, the liberal picture was wrong in whole and part. No reconciliation was possible. Maistre has appealed to the rejectionist element in conservatism and to its authoritarian fringe, as well as to cultural anti-moderns like Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and their descendants, who relished his mocking disdain.
The council or ‘state’ or ‘sovereign’ is a permanent society because its work is never done.
“One characteristic that most people suffering from depression share is that they run higher temperatures than non-depressed folks. And if you treat their depression, their temperature returns to normal. Not only that, but depressed people typically don’t sweat,” he says. It’s a bombshell of a statement, because if it’s true, then Raison is essentially arguing that depression stems from bad thermoregulation as much as from any other factor. I have to admit, it’s a statement that I have some trouble accepting on face value.
Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works.
