Sublime

War between supporters of the king and backers of Parliament broke out in 1642. During this battle, the legal fiction of the divine right of kings was replaced by another legal fiction: the sovereignty of the people.

From this point onwards, there are first certain seeds of decay, in spite of previously unmatched achievement, and then a gradual decadence. What is amiss, even in the best philosophy after Democritus, is an undue emphasis on man as compared with the universe. First comes scepticism, with the Sophists, leading to a study of how we know rather than

The key to unlocking the implications of megapolitical change is understanding the factors that precipitate revolutions in the use of violence. These variables can be somewhat arbitrarily grouped into four categories: topography, climate, microbes, and technology.

Protections against government tyranny do not prevent societies from tyrannizing themselves through the force of public opinion.

Adam Smith, the great inventor of modern economic thought, living in Scotland in the eighteenth century, published his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. As a great humanist, he observed the consequences of globalization with a globalist perspective rather than British partiality. (In his own work on moral sympathy, Smith spoke about the

I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of “self-interest.”56 It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes’ time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments. When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed

In John Carey’s brilliant book What Good are the Arts?, he demolishes, one by one, all the lessons and rules and theories that people have applied to culture and its significance – their attempts to ‘prove’, through science or logic or philosophy, that great art does this to you, and is better than not-great art because it has that. Ostensibly clev

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror