“When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.”
Irving Kristol, “‘When virtue loses all her loveliness’ — some reflections on Capitalism and ‘the free society,’” National Affairs, No. 21, Fall 1970.
On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, with Whittaker Chambers being the main witness in Hiss’s prosecution. Chambers confessed to having been a Soviet spy, and accused Hiss as an accomplice, which Hiss denied to his dying day. Chambers wrote a fascinating memoir about all this in Witness.
On January 20, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union was founded.
The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book VIII, Chapter 1.
Christians are beginning to lose the spirit of intolerance which animated them: experience has shown the error of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and of the persecution of those Christians in France whose belief differed a little from that of the king. They have realized that zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfill its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it.
Montesquieu, Persian Letters, no. 60.
“The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.”
On January 18, 1689, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, French satirist and philosopher, was born. His treatise The Spirit of the Laws was a major influence upon America’s founding generation. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He did more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon.
In 1811, former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson translated and published Destutt de Tracy’s Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s ‘Spirit of Laws,’ a very popular review of republican principles — which helps demonstrate how important this writers’ were to the American form of government.
Candidacy in trouble? Add a whopper. And make your daughter say it. This weekend at Townhall, the truth about the Clintons and America. Click on over, then come back here:
“The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.”
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890), Book I.
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