All Posts Tagged With: "French Revolution"
Wanted: A Healthy Dose of Humility
An awful lot of people in this world are really puffed up about themselves. One of the character traits I wish were much more widely practiced these days is good old-fashioned humility. T. S. Eliot said, “Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well [...]
30Nov2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Great French Inflation
Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations have often undermined the social fabric, ruined the economy, and sometimes brought revolution and tyranny in [...]
1Jul2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – September 2006
-
On Political
Equality
by Robert A. Dahl
Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling -
Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond Reviewed
by Gene Callahan -
Economic Liberties
and the Constitution
by Bernard H. Siegan Reviewed by George C. Leef -
Kidney for Sale by
Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Market
by Mark J. Cherry Reviewed by William L. Anderson
Where Are the Omelets?
On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.” Translation: “One can’t expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.” With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the [...]
1Oct1999 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedBenjamin Constant Liberty and Private Life
The French thinker Benjamin Constant was, according to respected Oxford University scholar Isaiah Berlin, “the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy.” Constant’s most important contribution: he recognized that “the main problem . . . [is] how much authority should be placed in any set of hands. For unlimited authority in anybody’s grasp was bound, he believed, sooner or later, to destroy somebody.”
1Oct1997 | Jim Powell | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 by Conor Cruise O’Brien
University of Chicago Press • 1996 • 385 pages • $29.95 Dr. Skoble is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southeast Missouri State University. Although Thomas Jefferson is popularly known as a great statesman, historians have long been aware that he, like everyone else, was not as purely good as his popular image would suggest. [...]
1Jul1997 | Aeon J. Skoble | 1 comment | ContinuedCharles James Fox, Valiant Voice for Liberty
Wartime provides the toughest test for a defender of liberty. That’s when governments everywhere tend to censor, jail, and even execute opponents. Charles James Fox became a legend for defending liberty during not one but two major wars. Uniquely among great British political figures, he spent almost his entire Parliamentary career—38 years—in the Opposition.
1Sep1996 | Jim Powell | 0 comments | ContinuedAlexis de Tocqueville: How People Gain Liberty and Lose It
Alexis de Tocqueville was a gentleman-scholar who emerged as one of the world’s great prophets. More than a century and a half ago, when most people were ruled by kings, he declared that the future belonged to democracy. He explained what was needed for democracy to work and how it could help protect human liberty. At the same time, he warned that a welfare state could seduce people into servitude. He saw why socialism must lead to slavery.
1Jul1996 | Jim Powell | 0 comments | ContinuedMary Wollstonecraft–Equal Rights for Women
In Western Europe during the late eighteenth century, single women had little protection under the law, and married women lost their legal identity. Women couldn’t retain a lawyer, sign a contract, inherit property, vote, or have rights over their children. As Oxford law professor William Blackstone noted in his influential Commentaries on the Laws of [...]
1Apr1996 | Jim Powell | 4 comments | ContinuedThomas Paine, Passionate Pamphleteer for Liberty
As nobody before, Thomas Paine stirred ordinary people to defend their liberty. He wrote the three top-selling literary works of the eighteenth century, which inspired the American Revolution, issued a historic battle cry for individual rights and challenged the corrupt power of government churches. His radical vision and dramatic, plainspoken style connected with artisans, servants, soldiers, merchants, farmers, and laborers alike. Paine’s work breathes fire to this day.
1Jan1996 | Jim Powell | 3 comments | Continued-
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