There’s this pseudo-science myth that when you’re ‘objective’ you just disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it really is, like God from heaven. But that’s rubbish. When a person’s objective his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) epitomized the British right’s chary accommodation to liberal modernity. A Romantic “Young England” Tory, he began as an opponent of suffrage extension and a defender of established institutions—landed property, English church, crown, old universities, and the Lords—which embodied in his mind not vested interests but conservative ideals of loyalty, deference, and faith. He ended as a pragmatic manager-tactician largely reconciled to mass democracy, social reform, and the upper classes’ loss of cultural privileges.
Whenever an event occurs that is great enough to illuminate its own past, history comes into being. Only then does the chaotic maze of past happenings emerge as a story which can be told, because it has a beginning and an end.
Violence is traditionally the ultima ratio in relationships between nations and the most disgraceful of domestic actions, being always considered the outstanding characteristic of tyranny. (The few attempts to save violence from disgrace, chiefly by Machiavelli and Hobbes, are of great relevance for the problem of power and quite illuminative of the early confusion of power with violence, but they exerted remarkably little influence on the tradition of political thought prior to our own time.)
