What Lord Acton Can Teach Us about Nationalism
Kai Weiss considers Lord Acton's timely essay "Nationality" to better understand our current political fevers.
Ferdinand Delacroix (1798-1863) "Liberty on the Barricades" (1830). Reproduction of illustrated album "Delacroix", published in Budapest, Hungary, 1963. (Image by Oleg Golovnev at shutterstock.com)Locating Traditionalism in Jurisprudence
How might we distinguish the traditionalist judicial decision?
Friday Roundup, February 7th
February's Liberty Law Forum engages the questions of what is American liberty and what is required to support it. Lead essay by Ted McAllister with responses from Bradley Thompson, (and upcoming) Steven Grosby, Bill Dennis, and Hans Eicholz. Getting from aid to enterprise: The next Liberty Law Talk discusses with Michael Miller, director of the Acton Institute's PovertyCure documentary, the conditions that should guide any approach to assist human flourishing in the poor regions of the world. Frequently missing, Miller highlights, in current interventions is an understanding of how crucial the rule of law, property rights, and markets are in the…
The Arc of Western Political Liberty
Characterizing the work and the significance of John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton (1834-1902), continues to be a complex project ( see, for example, John T. Noonan, Jr., “The Last Victorian," The New York Times on the Web, October 22, 2000). He is, of course, the “famous English historian Lord Acton,” as one respected textbook on the history of Western Civilization puts it. He held the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge, was the founding editor of the Cambridge Modern History, and produced a substantial body of work on the history of the West, particularly Western modernity. He intended…
Friday Roundup, December 20th
The current Liberty Law Talk is with author Christopher Lazarski on his new book, Power Tends to Corrupt: Lord Acton's Study of Liberty. Our Books essay this week is by Todd Zywicki on Nassim Taleb's Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Zywicki applies Taleb's insight that an antifragile "system . . . gains from disorder and volatility—i.e., exposure to stresses improves the operation of the system and makes it stronger," to financial regulation, arguing this approach would lead to better results than the regulatory philosophy of Dodd-Frank. Alberto Mingardi @Econ Lib on Chris DeMuth, Hayek, and Obamacare. George Will: Can the passive Congress…
Power Tends to Corrupt
Christopher Lazarski comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his deep inquiry into Lord Acton's attempt to understand the dimensions and nature of liberty as it unfolded in Western history. In this podcast, Lazarski underscores Lord Acton's historical quest to find the conditions of liberty, as well as his formal understanding of what constituted liberty. The conditions of Acton's ordered liberty we can describe as "arbitrary law," national history, and a bottom-up development of positive law. Arbitrary law was Acton's way of describing divine and natural law, which he believed a pillar in support of political liberty because it was law…
Alexander Hamilton and the Politics of Impatience: Part I
Editor’s note: Occasioned by Thomas McCraw’s The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy, this is the first post in a series by Liberty Fund Senior Fellow Hans Eicholz that will explore the contrasting visions for the early American republic in the financial, economic, and foreign policy thinking of Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin. Stay tuned for further developments.
Thomas McCraw has given us a compelling portrait of two major figures at the outset of American financial and economic history in The Founders and Finance. His primary aim is to draw out their similarities—their foreign origins, their experiences in commerce, their capacity to see the big picture of American nationhood—but I was struck more by their striking dissimilarities.
Where Albert Gallatin aspired initially to commercial success; Hamilton very early determined on a political career. Where Gallatin felt somewhat awkward on the political stage, Hamilton thrilled at the prospects of a public career and a public reputation. Where Gallatin learned to roll with the political punches of a diverse and rollicking republic (adapting policies to commercial and political realities), Hamilton formulated a clear, even unitary conception of where America needed to go and what he needed to do to get it there.
