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Libertarianism and Republican Virtue
I am short on time and effort these days, so I apologize for bringing up my school readings on the blog. I have moved on from Locke’s Two Treatises to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. This passage in...
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Montesquieu Is Back!
I just finished up Montesquieu for a class on political theory. I know economists will probably roll their eyes, but I liked the readings on the whole. From yet another passage in his magisterial work...
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Adam Smith, Or: The More Things Change…
…the more they stay the same. I have moved on from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in my Honors course on Western thought (it is being taught by a professor...
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Why Republican Libertarianism? II
(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented...
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More on Liberty and Homer: Tacitus, Montesquieu, and Humboldt
As I have discussed before here, there is a way of writing about liberty in a conscious focus on political thought, which finds liberty to be emulated in some respect, going back at least to the first...
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Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, IV: Britain the Enlightenment...
Following on from last post in this series, focused on the violent formation of the nineteenth century British state, a largely political theory post on how far Britain had a special status as a model...
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Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, V: Britain and European Models
The last post looked at how Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, the biggest classic of Enlightenment political thought, certainly in size and probably in importance, does not offer Britain as the...
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Flag Burning, the Bill of Rights, and Leaving America Behind: Fourth of July...
Yes, the American Revolution was special. It’s not yet uncool to recognize facts. You are entitled to your mistaken and unsupported opinions, however; this is a free country. (Not thanks to you!)...
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Liberty and the Novel I (Before Austen)
I’ve been working on Jane Austen and ethics recently. These ethical investigations have overlapped with considerations of politics and liberty, with regard to the progress of such ideas in the early...
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Reply to ‘Classical Liberalism, Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism’
I write in reply to Edwin van de Haar’s post ‘Classical Liberalism, Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism’, which contains some generous remarks about my social media posts while putting forward a view...
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In Japan, ghost stories are not to be scoffed at Christopher Harding, Aeon Montesquieu was the ultimate revisionist Henry Clark, Law & Liberty Did British merchants cause the Opium War? Jeffrey...
View ArticleAfternoon Tea: “Magna Carta for the World? The Merchants’ Chapter and Foreign...
This Article examines the early modern revival and subtle transformation in what is here called the merchants’ chapter of Magna Carta and then analyzes how lawyers, judges, and government officeholders...
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