All Posts Tagged With: "despotism"
Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect
Paul Rahe argues that American democracy is well down the road to the soft despotism that Tocqueville feared. But the outcome is not inevitable.
24Nov2010 | Ross B. Emmett | 0 comments | Continued“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”
I took that title from volume 2, section 4, chapter 6 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840). Considering what has been happening legislatively (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time to revisit Tocqueville’s writing about democratic despotism. He notes that despotism in a constitutional republic would be [...]
20May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”
Considering what has been happening legislatively of late (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time to revisit Tocqueville’s writing about democratic despotism.
2Apr2010 | Sheldon Richman | 8 comments | ContinuedThe Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline
As noted in the May Freeman, American revolutionaries mixed classical-republican and liberal political languages somewhat indiscriminately. Republicanism posited a relation between power and property in which independent proprietors were the bulwark of liberty. English critics of post-1688 Whig mercantilism deployed republican ideas, leading many historians to paint them as “agrarians” resisting capitalism, modernization, and social [...]
1Jun2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – June 2004
Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments by Benjamin Constant Liberty Fund • 2003 • 558 pages • $22 hardcover; $12 paperback Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling Nowhere does one find such clear and lucid expositions and defenses of human liberty as those found among the French classical liberals of the nineteenth century, a group [...]
1Jun2004 | FEE Admin | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Steps to Economic Freedom
Christopher Lingle is a visiting professor of economics, ESEADE at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. Many Latin American countries suffered for decades under a form of homegrown despotism. The accompanying repression of political liberties left a legacy of far-reaching state intervention, widespread corruption, persistently high rates of poverty, and slow economic growth. Emerging market economies [...]
1Jul2001 | Christopher Lingle | 1 comment | ContinuedDespotismDemocratic Nations
In his foreword to the 1956 paperbacked edition of The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press) Friedrich A. Hayek quotes briefly from Democracy in America, Part II, Book IV, Chapter VI, and suggests that the chapter be read “in order to realize with what acute insight De Tocqueville was able to foresee [in 1835] [...]
1Jun1956 | Alexis De Tocqueville | 0 comments | Continued-
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