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| 2020 publication |
With the justifying authority of God’s natural law increasingly absent, modernists needed a new way to ground their notions of justice and morality in something higher—something more worthy than self-interest alone.
True citizenship is about treating even the most trivial choice as a chance to shape your society and be a leader.
[The chief] causes of sociopolitical instability (in order of importance) are (1) elite overproduction leading to intraelite competition and conflict, (2) popular immiseration, resulting from falling living standards, and (3) the fiscal crisis of the state.
If there is anything that could be called progress in the religious history of mankind, it resides in the gradual preference for the self over the other as the primary sacrificial victim. It is precisely in this that the Christian religion rests its moral claim.
What distinguished these international laws from domestic laws, however, was that enforcement was voluntary, dependent on the consent of the parties to the agreements and not some sovereign authority beyond the individual nation-states. Governments accepted international treaties and agreements because it was in their interest to do so, and while a coalition of nations might try to compel agreement from a recalcitrant country through sanctions, boycotts, and the like, where a question of national interest was at stake no government was likely to yield short of war.
[T]he actions which are the subject matter of history are past actions and so the historian’s problem is how to breathe life into a past which is now dead.
I can think of no way by which statements of possibility can be rendered acceptable to positivists; and I think this is because they belong to an element in science which positivism ignores and by implication denies.
Anyone who allowed him his premise of the omnipotence of nature but then did not draw the logical conclusion that called for the “eradication” of all who were not “viable” or were “alien to the community”—anyone with such scruples belonged among those weaklings or blockheads who “denying the force of logic, shrank back from saying B and C after they had said A.” There were of course, both within the party and outside it, weaklings of this sort with their moral scruples, just as there were idiots who translated into practice the “totally mad plan” of zeppelins, even though “nature had not provided a single bird with a balloon.”
