José Azel 154 posts 0 comments

What the French then wanted was the stability that Napoleon offered. France would not know republican government for another 72 years. This vote for a “strongman” took place after only ten years of the French Revolution. As of this writing,…
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Is some form of authoritarianism superior to democracy as a political model to hasten economic development and stability? The question derives from the economic successes of authoritarian regimes in China, Singapore among others. More…
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For the historians of the American Civil War, the "lost cause" is an ideological movement that fantasizes the Confederate cause as a heroic struggle against very great difficulties. The doctrine of this lost cause highlights alleged virtues…
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Capitalism may be defined, as Karl Marx did, by its labor system, where the workers do not own their own means of production. It may also be defined by the metaphorical ‘market’ where the buying and selling takes place, or by private…
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The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1997) offers a conservative estimate of one hundred million innocent individuals murdered by Marxist socialists in the 20th century. To this, we can add the approximate twenty million…
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The antithesis will not replace the thesis but rather, out of the two, a new synthesis will emerge that incorporates a great deal of the old. Hegel doubted that a complete break with the past was politically possible. This failure of a…
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With his phrase “I am I and my circumstance,” Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) summarized the belief that human beings can not be isolated from their circumstances. For Ortega y Gasset individuals and societies are not…
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Patriotism is essential to liberty, because pride in our nation, and the willingness to defend it, form the basis of national self-determination. In tandem with patriotism, nationalism has the virtue of being a strong force for unity,…
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Technically, freedom is a more general concept that may be defined as “the power or right to act, speak, or think, as one wants.” Freedom is a subjective and personal state of affairs. In contrast, liberty is more associated with an…
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The political scientist, and historian of ideas, Mark Lilla has coined the term tyrannophilia to explain the love of tyrants shown by many intellectuals. Lilla is a self described liberal with book titles such as “The Once and Future…
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Social scientist often used the liar’s paradox to illustrate the problem of self-reference in which we process information according to our biases. We ought to be rational, but we fall short of rationality. We consume information, not to…
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Welzel argues that, as a society progresses, citizens become less concerned with physical needs and shift their values toward what he calls “emancipatory values.” He defines emancipation as the universal human desire for an existence free…
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