Great piece. I look forward to the rest of the series. I am reading Wealth of Nations and will follow it with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment’s. I had a Professor in undergrad, Jim Halteman, who interpreted Moral Sentiments as Adam Smith’s foundations for a free market to work. It seems many thinkers at the time had a similar belief in the need for a moral self governing society. My favorite quote from your piece:
“The work of democratic civilization is thus to join equality to liberty. That work cannot be accomplished by constitutions alone. It requires law, religion, association, local self-government, property, education, and mores. Above all, it requires citizens who have learned, through practice, to govern themselves.”
Quote: "The democratic age would be saved, if at all, by learning how equality, freedom, and liberty can live together without devouring one another. That task begins before politics as we usually define it, in the habits of ordinary life. It begins in the family, the town, the church, the school, the association, the jury, the meeting, the market, and the thousand small practices through which people learn to act with others."
Quote: "Democracy is a social condition before it is a political form. It begins with what he called equality of conditions: the weakening of hereditary rank, the erosion of fixed social orders, and the gradual emergence of a world in which human beings increasingly see themselves as comparable, mobile, and entitled to judge their own affairs."
Do you think Islam is capable of, compatible with, that? Shouldn't we call barbarism out by its name?
Great piece. I look forward to the rest of the series. I am reading Wealth of Nations and will follow it with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment’s. I had a Professor in undergrad, Jim Halteman, who interpreted Moral Sentiments as Adam Smith’s foundations for a free market to work. It seems many thinkers at the time had a similar belief in the need for a moral self governing society. My favorite quote from your piece:
“The work of democratic civilization is thus to join equality to liberty. That work cannot be accomplished by constitutions alone. It requires law, religion, association, local self-government, property, education, and mores. Above all, it requires citizens who have learned, through practice, to govern themselves.”
Quote: "The democratic age would be saved, if at all, by learning how equality, freedom, and liberty can live together without devouring one another. That task begins before politics as we usually define it, in the habits of ordinary life. It begins in the family, the town, the church, the school, the association, the jury, the meeting, the market, and the thousand small practices through which people learn to act with others."
You forgot the neighborhood,
Quote: "Democracy is a social condition before it is a political form. It begins with what he called equality of conditions: the weakening of hereditary rank, the erosion of fixed social orders, and the gradual emergence of a world in which human beings increasingly see themselves as comparable, mobile, and entitled to judge their own affairs."
Do you think Islam is capable of, compatible with, that? Shouldn't we call barbarism out by its name?