The Revolution You Get Won't Be the Revolution You Planned

By -
"The fears and suspicions engendered by the radical revolutionary ideas adumbrated during the Interregnum made suggestions for even the most modest and logical change anathema for a hundred years to come... Once again the result of the projects of the revolutionaries was the exact opposite of what they had intended... The preexisting élite became more deeply entrenched in property and power. Fear that any change might once more open the floodgate of revolution blocked reasonable reform to meet new conditions for over a century." -- Lawrence Stone, "Results of the English Revolutions," Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, p. 59 - 61

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy10:21 PM

    I don't trust anybody who uses "adumbrate."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Prateek3:58 AM

    The self-contradictory thing about a revolution is that it makes all politics impossible.

    Politics is obviously about reaching a peaceful compromise, rather than overthrowing an existing system.

    Revolutionaries, once they come to power, justify new revolutions against them, since others who don't share their views can simply do what they did - ignore politics and go straight for the uprising.

    Men like Robert Mugabe learnt this the hard way when his old guerrilla buddies became his biggest enemies.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more