Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"If -- not merely for practical purposes but as a matter of speculative certainty -- we identify its injunction with any particular duty, circumstances will be found upon which the bindingness of that duty is contingent, and the too hasty identification of the categorical imperative with it will issue in a suspicion that, after all, there is no categorical imperative, no absolute duty, at all. After the explanations just given, however, we need not shrink from asserting as the basis of morality an unconditional duty, which yet is not a duty to do anything unconditionally except to fulfil that unconditional duty." -- Prolegomena to Ethics , from Principles of Political Obligation and other writings , p. 261 This captures very nicely a point I have been making about morality: it is both timeless and universal and dependent upon circumstances. The view that it must be one or the other ignores Hegel's philosophical breakthrough in conceiving the concrete universal.

"There can be nothing in a nation however exalted its mission, or in a society however perfectly organized, which is not in the persons composing the nation or the society. Our ultimate standard of worth it is an ideal of personal worth. All other values are relative to value for, of, or in a person. To speak of any progress or improvement or development of a nation or society or mankind except as relative to some greater worth of persons, is to use words without meaning. The saying that 'a nation is merely an aggregate of individuals' is indeed fallacious, but mainly on account of the introduction of the emphatic 'merely'. The fallacy lies in the implication that the individuals could be what they are -- could have their moral and spiritual qualities -- independently of their existence in a nation. The notion is conveyed that they bring those qualities ready-made into the national existence, which thereupon results from their combination; while the truth is that...

"Though it is important to insist that, since in all willing a man is his own object to himself, the object by which the act is determined, the will is always free -- or more properly that a man in willing is necessarily free, since willing constitutes freedom, and 'free will' is a pleonasm = 'free freedom' -- the nature of the freedom really differs according to the nature of the object which the man makes his own, or with which he identifies himself." -- "On the Different Senses of 'Freedom' as Applied to Will and to the Moral Progress of Man," from Principles of Political Obligation and other writings , p. 228

"In the pride of triumphant reason they took pleasure in trampling on the common feelings and interests, through which reason must work, if it is to work at all." -- "Four lectures on the English Revolution," from Principles of Political Obligation and other writings , pp. 220-221

"And it is important to understand that while the enforcement of obligations is possible, that of moral duties is impossible. But the establishment of obligations by law or authoritative custom, and the gradual recognition of moral duties, have not been separate processes. They have gone together in the history of man. The growth of the institutions by which more complete equality of rights as gradually secured to a wider range of persons, and of those interests in various forms of social well-being by which the will is moralised, have been related to each other as the outer and the inner side of the same spiritual development..." -- Principles of Political Obligation , p. 192

"In order then to understand the nature of the state, we must understand the nature of those rights which do not come into being with it but arise out of social relations that exist where a state is not; it being the first, though not the only, office of the state to maintain those rights. They depend for their existence, indeed, on society -- a society of men who recognize each other as isoi kai homoioi [equals], as capable of a common well-being -- but not on society's having assumed the form of a state. They may therefore be treated as claims of the individual without reference to the form of the society which concedes or recognizes them..." -- Principles of Political Obligation , p. 116

"If political society is supposed to have originated in a pact at all, the difference between it and the preceding state of nature cannot with any plausibility be held to have been much more than a difference between a society regulated by written law and officers with defined power and one regulated by  customs and tacitly recognized authority." -- Principles of Political Obligation , p. 46 This is an important point contra those who fantasize about "doing away with politics": there is no evidence of people anywhere ever having lived in a society without politics. Today, we just have more formally organized politics extending over wider domains than in the past.

People who want to attack Mises's use of "praxeology" as some bizarre, idiosyncratic move on his part often fail to realize how common this sort of analysis was among philosophers in the early 20th century. Bradley, Bosanquet, Green, Croce, Collingwood, and Oakeshott all perform analyses similar to Mises, sometimes described as examining the presuppositions of human action. For instance, here is Green: "without intention there is no action... In saying then that the proper, because the only possible, function of law is to enforce performance of or abstinence from external actions , it is implied that its function is to produce or prevent certain intentions, for without intention on the part of someone there is no act." -- Principles of Political Obligation , pp. 18-19 I do think that Mises made two mistakes in this area: 1) There was no need for him to use the term "praxeology": this made what he was doing seem stranger than it needed to. (In f...