In response to: Respectable Partisans of Modern Liberty
Sir George Hayter's 'The House of Commons' (1833)Edmund Burke’s defense of political parties is also a defense of conservatism. It remains true that the “respectability of party”—Harvey C. Mansfield’s perfect phrase from Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke—continues to depend on the respectability of conservatism. Professor Blitz suggests this also, asking in his Liberty Forum essay what we can learn “from Mansfield’s Burke that helps with our current predicaments.” Among the most valuable lessons, says Blitz, are the meaning of natural rights, the centrality of virtue, and the importance of “attachment to particular institutions.” I would emphasize what connects these. The point of partisan…
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Parties have long been respectable features of modern liberal democracy. But that is not to say that in America our current political parties are respected. The summer of Donald Trump, which may finally be fading, suggests a craving for leadership and boldness that is larger than partisan affiliation: Americans increasingly doubt that either party is…
Mark Blitz reads Harvey Mansfield as closely as Mansfield reads Edmund Burke. For this, and for his excellent Liberty Forum essay on Mansfield’s Statesmanship and Party Government, we are in Blitz’s debt. The book’s simultaneously ambivalent and appreciative reading of Burke endures 50 years after its publication, and will rank among the definitive texts on the…
The three replies to my essay are thoughtful discussions of important issues, and I thank the respondents for writing them. Professor Weiner correctly suggests that to rely on great men is a mistake. A polity will not endure if it allows significant decline and constantly requires for its salvation an excellence that is always rare. It…
